FSU Football: Time for Noles to accept 2018 mistakes, move on from it

FSU football will be attempting to do something in the 2019 season they haven’t done in over four decades – bounce back from a losing season the year before.

In the coming months, the FSU football team will return to the field for fall practice ahead of one of the best moments of the year – opening the 2019 season when they take on Boise State over in Jacksonville. But this season opener is going to be even bigger than years past for a variety of reasons.

The biggest reason? It officially will put an end to all the talk about what took place during the 2018 season as the Seminoles can move on from the first losing season the program went through since 1976 after going 5-7 in the first season under head coach Willie Taggart.

Since Taggart won just one of the final five games on the schedule – a slate of games that saw FSU football take on two teams that made the College Football Playoff and another that played in a New Years Six bowl game – his seat has gotten quite warm in Tallahassee, even warmer than it was before he coached his first game for the Noles by a chorus of critics.

Florida State Seminoles Football

In the past few months, more has come to light about what things were like within the FSU football program before their former coach bolted for Texas A&M and the disaster that was left (something we’ve been saying for a while) – all of which came to a head this week with an article by Bleacher Report.

In the article, the program was essentially labeled a mess in the seasons that followed the 2013 national title up to that former “leader” quitting with one game left in the 2017 regular season – and opening up a whole boatload of problems that Taggart and the Noles are still attempting to recover from at this point.

While Taggart did accept some of the blame for issues that took place in 2018, it made it very clear that problems were formed long before he took the job leading the FSU football team – so what do the Seminoles do now as they look to start a whole new streak of winning seasons and bowl game appearances?

Two words: move on.

There is nothing that can be done about what took place last season for the Seminoles. In a perfect world, the Noles win just one more game – like defeating the rival Miami Hurricanes, who they lost to by one point – and end up in a bowl game and we’re not talking about half the things we are this summer.

But that didn’t take place and the Seminoles now have their consecutive winning season and bowl season streaks sitting at zero. From this point on, it’s all going to be on Taggart and the 2019 Noles – if there is a epic meltdown and the Seminoles have a second straight losing season, the blame will fall squarely on him.

It’s not going to do any good to continuously remind people about the joke that was the end of the former coach’s time in Tallahassee – the best thing to do from this point on is build the Taggart years into something similar to what took place after the last losing season: a decades long run by a coach that turned out to be one of the best in college football history.