We take a look at the progression of FSU Football under the current staff.
Your honor, if it pleases the court, I would like to make my opening statements.
The FSU football fanbase’s Saturday couch coordinators and recliner recruiters need to put a sock in it. You guys are talking about wanting to fire someone eight games into a season. (A bad eight games, but still eight games on the job).
A year zero season with no capabilities to recruit from the high school ranks and barely a chance to recruit his team. Let’s go back to where this all started. Jimbo Fisher quit on FSU football midseason in 2017.
This situation comes after a highly touted quarterback suffers a debilitating injury, and James Blackman, a project type, is thrust into the spotlight and gets his bell rung every week from then and on.
Then we can neither recruit at key positions well nor develop talent, and that brings us to today. The fanbase is talking about firing a third head coach in four years while paying a Willie Taggart buyout.
It is not feasible to create lasting success with no stability at head coach. At a certain point, we have to stick with someone and let them work out the kinks to turn this program around.
Another firing will not help the players or the program to improve in the short term. The only thing it spells is more turmoil for a program that is the worst it’s been in 40 years.
In housing market terms, this isn’t a rehab or fixer upper. This situation is a teardown and rebuild, and you cant do either with a revolving door surrounding the leadership in your program.
Now let’s go into specific reasons why this fanbase needs to take a chill pill.
Year 0
Before we get into the nitty-gritty here, I want to preface this section by saying that throughout his tenure, up until the Louisiana-Monroe game, I was behind Taggart all the way. In hindsight, it was a baseless faith of hoping he would turn things around.
But with recruits jumping ship and losses that kept getting worse and worse to watch, it was time to part ways. Had Odell Haggins not controlled the freefall, FSU football would have again been without a bowl game.
In Norvell’s defense, I want to revisit the no off-season point because I believe it is the strongest one.
Coach Norvell didn’t even have his whole staff in place when he had to start salvaging this recruiting class. He had a defensive back coach lured away in that time frame and still somehow got a mid-30s recruiting class to sneak into the top 25.
Then he has to show his current players what he can do in a practice setting to get them to buy-in, and that was stopped three days in because of a global pandemic.
He then has to not only get these kids to buy into him, and his staff over zoom, which we all know isn’t the same as real life, but also install his playbook and scheme to relatively unknown commodities.
He has to do this while getting the transfers to join in and get them eligible to play and the situation snowballs and gets out of hand. He didn’t do himself any favors when he misspoke in an interview and that mistake was costly as the buy-in of the veteran players significantly diminished if not evaporated completely, and he had to quickly had to win his team back.
That probably brought the team back to square one, after all of its momentum built during “Tour of Duty,” and the summer spent in quarantine.
The during fall camp, the injured team limped into installing their scheme and another player revolt that lead to DJ Mathews entering the transfer portal immediately, leaving a gap in talent behind Terry and Helton until the former left the team.
With the consistent “1-step forward and 2-steps back” of the whole off-season, it makes sense that much of the regular season ended up following the same path.
Realistic Expectations
With everything from the off-season in mind, this year has become vital for developing talent and selling something.
In a normal year, with a spring and a summer offseason regiment, the team can camp and see what part of the playbook should be used and see who they need to add to the program.
With this youth movement, the coaching staff has to tell the portal recruits that they can play on day 1. It has to let the high school recruits know they can play on day one. “Do you want to be apart of the CLIMB?” has to be the thing you ask them every week.
Most of the errors on defense have come from youth. Missed angles, bad reads, and poor discipline have plagued this team for the past three years, and even though the freshmen still are guilty of this, there is more potential to fix those problems with the youth.
The coaching staff seems to be weeding out the dead weight on the roster that was left for them and letting people who don’t want to build with them leave. When we look back to Isaiah Bolden and Cyrus Fagan types leaving the program, they were blue-chips that weren’t developed properly and became non-contributors. This staff is looking to raise the floor of the program with players that can be developed.
They are leaving no stone unturned, fighting for prospects at the high school, junior college, and transfer portal ranks to install new talent for this rebuild.
FSU Football Staff Adaptability
I have never seen this staff reluctant to change. Willie Taggart and Jimbo Fisher seemed stuck in their ways and dug in their heels when asked for adjustment. The current staff can quickly identify issues, whether it’s on the recruiting trail or mid-game
Florida State Seminoles Football
The defensive line as a whole has played better since the beginning of the year, finally showing up in the UNC game.
There has been some pressure on the quarterbacks in every game since, and the defensive line had been better against the run.
Now there is still work to be done setting the edge and keeping contain, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I think that will come as the youth at linebacker becomes more consistent and can help with better angles and tackling.
The last thing I need from this defense is better safety play, but now that Nasirildeen is back, and can help the youth come along there. The pieces are there, and we have to give it time to come together.
On offense, the improvement of the o-line and the running back positions stand out. Both were thought to be the weaker position groups on this team all offseason.
I am by no means saying that the offensive line is good, Chubba Purdy was the most pressured quarterback against NC state, but it is better than it was at the start of the season, and has performed very well.
We could look back on the biggest misstep of the Norvell era, him playing James Blackman against Pitt, but he quickly corrected that, and I believe it was smart at the time because you lost two of your teams leaders in that game, Jordan Travis and Devontae Love-Taylor, you had to find a spark by supplying a leader off the bench.
I feel like there is also an element of not wanting to break one of your freshmen in play as well. Similar to his decision to opt for the Tate Rodemaker series in the second quarter of the NC State game. That was also ill-advised as it looked like Purdy was just getting adjusted and was ready to cut loose.
Lastly, they have been wise in not heavily recruiting Florida. Under normal circumstances, not recruiting Florida isn’t a great decision, and you shouldn’t be coaching at Florida State if you cannot entice Florida kids to come to Tallahassee.
Before the pandemic, the coaching staff created inroads very smartly. They went around the state, introduced themselves to the high school coaches and the highly touted prospects, and tried to supply faces for names. Obviously, due to COVID-19, the state tour was postponed, and the staff couldn’t go to schools and build on those relationships.
So what has Mike Norvell and his staff done? Adjusted by using their connections in fertile recruiting grounds like Louisiana, and Alabama and Texas to get players who are high ceiling/developmental types that aren’t taken at their instate institutions.
This philosophy has worked with current commits like Hunter Washington, Byron Turner Jr, Rod Orr, and Jackson West. It’s working with prospects like Ke’travion Hargrove, Destyn Hill, and Tywone Malone. They have also done this while still having about half of their 15 player class hails from Florida. Players like Omarion Cooper, Kevin Knowles, Shambre Jackson, and Koby Gross.
Now the coaching staff will apply similar tactics to the JUCO and transfer portal ranks as they look to fill out their 2020 class.
Final Thoughts
I won’t waste your time by shoulda-coulda-woulda-ing our way to wins but allowing the optimist in me to look to next year and accept this year for what it is, much like I have done with the rest of 2020.
My message overall, for recruiting, gameplay, and in general, is not to be prisoners of the moment and be excited for the next season when you watch the flashes of talent from this team.
This team will be bad for the rest of the season, especially against Clemson. This staff is playing the long game, so as fans, we have to play it too.
For financial reasons, which is probably the biggest reason to have patience with this staff, Norvell is at least going to coach FSU for the next three years. Per HKM, a company that analyzes the contracts for head coaches and ranks them by favorability, Coach Mike Norvell has the 13th best contract in FBS.
This favorable deal comes off of the heels of the Willie Taggart buy-out that costs the FSU football program millions.
Norvell is not going anywhere, so either buy into the long haul rebuilding of this football club or start a lemonade stand for his buy-out.
In my opinion, FSU will continue the CLIMB.