FSU football: 2023 ‘Noles recruiting focusing heavily in Florida and Georgia

One of the knocks on the FSU football coaching staff under Mike Norvell was the lack of recruiting ties to Florida and Georgia.

Both states have been fertile recruiting grounds for the Noles in past years, and it looks like the coaching staff plans to return to those roots under Mike Norvell. I wrote a little over a year ago about how the coaching staff used the pandemic to get a head start on 2023 recruiting.

At the time, they had issued 89 offers to players in Florida and Georgia, which was 59 percent of the offers. As of today, the coaching staff offered 121 players in those two states, which represents 46 percent of the total.

That’s an increase over the 39 percent total in the 2022 recruiting cycle. The 2023 recruiting cycle appears to be the first in which the staff will not have any limitations regarding the ability to get students on campus or visit them in person.

They’ve done a solid job of getting lots of prospects on campus this month as they prepare for upcoming junior days in March. FSU football has added more off-the-field coaches and analysts recently with ties to the Sunshine State:

Coach Fuller’s resume speaks for itself as he’s been around high school football near Tallahassee for years.

Coach Rodriguez is a Miami native who worked for former Miami Hurricanes head coach Butch Davis at FIU. While there he helped on the defensive side of the ball as a graduate assistant. He also helped coordinate Scout Special Teams.

Parting Thoughts

These offers are a good sign the staff is creating and leaning on relationships built in these two states. We’re don’t see nearly as many offers from states like Louisiana and Tennessee as we’ve seen in the previous two recruiting cycles.

The question is will they show enough improvement in the 2022 season for that next tier of players to be intrigued enough to give the Noles a shot? The ACC schedule release next week should give us a better idea of how the season could go.