FSU football: How Mike Norvell and staff earned recruiting momentum

FSU football has the No. 3 ranked recruiting class in the nation less than a year after finishing 3-6 in a pandemic shorten year.

That shortened year was the first year for FSU football with Mike Norvell at the helm. A well-respected coach among his peers, with a lot of positive attributes, but also one with question marks when it comes to recruiting with the big dogs.

Norvell showed glimpses of what he was capable of in his first 10 days on the job when he signed two quarterbacks in one signing class.

One of those quarterbacks, Chubba Purdy, ranked as a blue-chip player, the first blue-chip quarterback signed by FSU since the 2017 recruiting cycle.

The spring of 2020 came, and Mike Norvell and the staff got tons of players on campus. The whispers of the energy of the coaching staff and the practices being different from the previous regime began to percolate.

Then everything got shut down. What did the staff do with the time they would have spent planning practices and evaluating players?

They spent a lot of it on recruiting and evaluating the film of 2021 and 2022 players. The staff never met some of the players they signed in the 2021 class face-to-face before they arrived on campus.

That’s crazy! However, it was the work they put into the 2022 recruiting class that has them in their current position.