FSU Football set for must win 2019 season as fall camp opens

FSU football knows the circumstances surrounding the upcoming season – for both the team and their embattled head coach – as fall camp begins Friday.

Since the clock turned to November 25th of last year, the FSU football team has been looking forward to the start of the 2019 season – mainly because, since they didn’t qualify for a bowl game for the first time in over three and a half decades, it would be the earliest they stopped playing a season since 1981.

Now, with the opener to the upcoming season coming up four weeks from Saturday in Jacksonville when the Noles take on Boise State, those in garnet and gold know what is at stake for the upcoming season if you’re the Seminoles.

In what will be the 73rd season of FSU football in the program’s history, it is without a doubt the most important slate of 12 regular season games that the Seminoles have EVER played – I don’t just mean this decade or this century, but in the entire history of the program.

Florida State Seminoles Football

While some might argue that a statement like that could be a little drama filled, the fact of the matter is that the last time the Seminoles had a losing season before 2018 (a 5-6 record in the first season for Bobby Bowden in 1976) was the fourth straight losing campaign for the Seminoles at a time where the program wasn’t a winning one – at all.

Fast forward four decades to a point where, when Willie Taggart took over the program for the 2018 season, they had 25 seasons of double digit wins – to go along with ACC and national titles by the dozens – in the 41 campaigns that followed…so to start things off with a 5-7 campaign was the definition of a letdown.

By this point, much has been written here about how it isn’t all on Taggart and how this disaster was set up in part by the former administration – but from the 2019 season and on, the rebuild project for FSU football can only be claimed by (and blamed on if it doesn’t work) the man entering his second season leading the Noles.

Taggart knows that the mission and the end goal is all on this year’s team, as he told Chop Chat during an interview this past May during a booster event in Miami Gardens:

"“We’re going to work our tail off to get back to where we’ve got to go and knowing that we’ve got to do it. No one else is going to do it for us and we’ve got to win. We’ve got to beat people in order to do that and it’s on us to do it.”"

For some, it may seem simple – but for those inside the game, the mission to turn the Seminoles into a double digit win team might take another year. But for this moment, and to essentially save his job, Taggart and the Seminoles need to start with a simple goal: win more games than they lose.