Hot Take: FSU football has less pressure to win in 2023 than last year
By Kelvin Hunt
This Is What Pressure Looks Like
Imagine being a new coach with no Power 5 experience and getting a job at a place like FSU with no direct recruiting ties to Florida or Georgia.
You hire your staff, and as soon as you hit the ground running in the spring, the entire world stops, and you can’t have real practices or do anything, but still have to play a regular season.
The culture on the team is terrible, multiple players have rebelled, and the product on the field is awful. One of your biggest rivals blows the doors off of you 52-10, and you can’t do any in-person recruiting.
You can’t do in-person recruiting until June 2021, only six months before the Early Signing Period. The next season begins, and after a valiant effort at home in an overtime loss against Notre Dame, you lose the next three games for an 0-4 start, including a home loss against Jacksonville State.
I appreciate the sentiment of pressure going into the 2023 season, but I don’t think you could place any more pressure on a coach to win than on Mike Norvell at that point. Norvell was 3-10 at FSU at this point, with way more questions than answers.
Who was the QB going to be? Would all the transfer players quit? Could he recruit well enough to turn the program around? That was the breaking point, and Mike Norvell and his players and staff didn’t break.
They didn’t break when they got punched in the gut and humiliated by Travis Hunter a couple of weeks after that season ended, and they had gone 5-3 in the final eight games. They didn’t fold when they failed to sign any high school wide receivers in the 2022 recruiting class.