FSU football: Media pushing false money narratives about the Noles

FSU football fans or FSU leadership have never blamed their recent woes on the lack of money or resources.

Heck, FSU fired a football coach after a year and a half on the job. Why? Because they wanted to compete at the highest level and quickly understood it wasn’t going to happen under that regime.

They realized they didn’t do due diligence. Well, folks who are no longer at FSU didn’t do due diligence, but that mistake still falls on FSU, and it’s a mistake they own.

FSU isn’t broke, but the narrative some media folks are using in their reactions to FSU’s stance they likely need to leave the ACC to compete at the highest level is misguided.

It’s no coincidence these media folks reside or cover ACC teams based in North Carolina. Check out some of these takes from yesterday:

Yes, FSU made a bad hire and paid the price. However, FSU is one of two or maybe three ACC schools that invests in its athletic programs to compete at the highest level.

They understand football is king when it comes to revenue and allows other non-revenue sports to be competitive. It’s not their fault the Wake Forest, Boston College, Syracuse, Virginia, and others don’t or can’t do the same.

Right, those conference media rights deals had nothing to do with FSU’s lack of success on the field. As I mentioned, a bad hire was the culprit, nothing more, nothing less. However, FSU’s trajectory over the last 21 games (basically two years) suggests those days are in the rearview mirror.

When FSU football has competent coaches, which Mike Norvell’s track record suggests that he is, they can compete at the highest levels, even in the ACC’s current state. However, it’s the foresight to understand no team in the ACC can compete at the highest level(Clemson included) if faced with a 40+ million dollar revenue gap that will continue to grow year after year because the ACC can’t renegotiate their media rights deal for another 13 years. If you were to put any current SEC program in the ACC right now, they’d take the same stance.

TCU has never consistently competed for national titles or won one in most of our lifetimes. The geography of most of the teams in the B1G puts them at a severe disadvantage logistically to where the majority of the top talent resides nationally. There’s a reason most of the top talent comes from Florida, Georgia, and Texas, with California as the biggest outlier outside of the southeast. Nobody cares about basketball. However, the point about a manufactured financial crisis is laughable. There is nothing manufactured about the deficit every ACC school will face in the next 5-10 years, much less 13.

The ACC can’t give FSU what it wants or needs, so why the animosity towards the the program that’s done more in its time in the conference than any other program? Instead of wondering how FSU is going to get out of the ACC, folks should focus on the third rate conference it will become whether FSU stays or leaves. However, FSU shouldn’t be chastised because they don’t want to stay in a conference that’s not serious about playing big-time football. Nor should they because they understand how not playing big-time football will cripple all the other non-revenue sports.