FSU Football: Insiders say Noles have one of the top QB battles

FSU Football has a battle for the starting spot going on between the 2017 starter and a grad transfer from a Power Five program that dominated before.

When the FSU football team takes the field for the opener of the 2019 season against Boise State, many people have a feeling that it will be the man who started all but one game in the 2017 season, James Blackman, who is going to get the first snaps at quarterback for the Seminoles against those Broncos.

On the other side of things, the Noles have several transfers in the program that includes Alex Hornibrook – a name that fans of college football will remember as the man who led the Wisconsin Badgers to within a game of the playoff that season and led them to two straight bowl wins over Miami.

Needless to say, the player who will be taking the first offensive snaps for FSU football has not been decided even if one is favored over the other – and that unknown of who will be the starting signal caller has the battle in Tallahassee being one of the most watched across the game heading into the upcoming season.

Florida State Seminoles Football

Both Sports Illustrated and Yahoo! Sports recently ranked the battle between Blackman and Hornibrook as one of the top ones that need to be watched heading into the opener just under three weeks from now.

"Sports Illustrated: “James Blackman is the obvious candidate to replace Deondre Francois, who was dismissed from the team in February. He’s the clear leader—and the only QB on the roster who has played in this offense—but the job is not totally his yet.”Yahoo! Sports: The likely day-one starter is James Blackman, who has made 13 career starts and showed promise in 2017 and ’18. But the addition of Wisconsin grad transfer Alex Hornibrook (32 career starts) makes for an interesting situation.Whoever gets the job, second-year coach Willie Taggart really needs him to play well after last year’s 5-7 bust. The Seminoles are coming off their worst scoring season since 1981, averaging just 21.9 points per game."

In reality, this job is going to be Blackman’s to lose – both from his experience leading the Seminoles for virtually a full season of games in his career along with the fact that he has actually bulked up by nearly 30 pounds from his first season to the point he really isn’t the same “Slim Jim” that he was in 2017.

Which brings up the important question: why would Hornibrook leave a power program like Wisconsin to come to a FSU football program building off of a losing campaign? You have to think there is a part of him that really believes he will be the starting quarterback against Boise State.

For the Seminoles, all that matters is one thing: that the starting quarterback wins more games than they lose.