FSU Football: How Fisher era with Seminoles is inching closer to failure

The recent FSU football academic numbers that came out this week were the final straw in what turned out to be a joke for eight seasons with the Seminoles.

For the better part of the last year and a half, FSU football nation has been working to get over the sudden and hurtful way in which their former coach – and I know I promised not to say his name anymore, but we already did it in the title so we’re moving on with it – decided to take his “talents” and move off to the state of Texas and the SEC.

When Jimbo Fisher made the decision to leave before the 2017 regular season finale for the Seminoles, it was the end of an era of ups and downs for the Noles during and eight season stretch that included six seasons of double digit wins, three ACC championships and that national title during the 2013 season.

It’s also a stretch of moments that included the countless arrests of top players, a scandal involving the quarterback that won the third Heisman in the history of FSU football and officially ended this past week with the news that the program’s APR for the final year under Fisher ranked the worst in the entire FBS.

Florida State Seminoles Football

So, in conclusion, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that the eight seasons under Jimbo Fisher as head coach of the FSU football team can be summed up with one word: failure.

We’ve written about this before when it comes to Fisher’s two terms in Tallahassee: coaching arguably the greatest college football team during the 2013 season, a team that in actuality was only that good because of the quality of players that were recruited by assistant coaches who got the heck out before the 2013 season took place.

After that magical season for FSU football, where Fisher became a real life version of Bud Kilmer from the movie Varsity Blues, the Seminoles started their downhill term and should consider themselves lucky to have won double digit games in the three seasons that followed.

I’m not going to take away from the fact that Fisher was, indeed, a very good coach for the Seminoles ON THE FIELD. That’s a fact that can’t be argued, just like (as much as I still support him) you can’t argue the fact that Willie Taggart needs to step his second season up big time after the losing campaign of the 2018 season.

With that being said, at what cost did FSU football have to pay to reach that level of success from the first half of the decade? Look at the academic numbers that just came in this past week: the Seminoles’ rate according to the NCAA has dipped the last five years to the point where the Noles got a 936 on the rating scale for the football team.

(To put that into perspective, the Seminoles finished with the lowest score of the 129 teams who played in the FBS during the 2017 season – because UAB didn’t field a team that season, so they get a mulligan for that year.)

FSU football knew they were going to be in for a rebuilding process when Fisher bolted for a massive payday with Texas A&M (for the record, $7.5 million a year is a heck of a salary and I don’t blame him for taking the money, but the way everything went down was beyond slimy) – but this is crazy.

It’s also the icing on the cake for the Seminoles that, despite all the wins and championships on the field for FSU football over eight seasons (and a 14-2 record over Miami and Florida), Fisher’s time in Tallahassee was a failure with all the off field issues that surrounded the program and somehow are continuing to surround even with him in Texas.

Hopefully, FSU football nation will begin to see all the things that Taggart was saying the Seminoles needed to overcome to turn around the ship in Tallahassee – a ship that hit failure before Taggart even landed in town.