FSU football General Manager has fans in an uproar with recent interview

Florida State fans don’t have many positives to say about the current Mike Norvell staff, and one individual behind the scenes, who fans have not been a fan of for a while, did an interview recently that has very poor timing. That individual is FSU General Manager Darrick Yray.

If this interview had been released before the season started and FSU went on to defeat Alabama the way that they did, Yray would look like a genius. The fact that FSU has lost four straight games, three to teams with much lesser talent, doesn’t make Yray look great here.

It’s interesting because Yray says a lot of the right things in the interview. He states that he believes high school recruiting is the most important aspect and that the transfer portal should be used to fill roster holes. However, if you can add difference-makers from the portal, you should.

He talks about valuing the character of a recruit and all of the other facets. At the same time, FSU had terrible culture as a team in 2024, and some of those issues seemed to rear its head in the last couple of games this year. Ironically, the title of the interview is "Revealing How Florida State Turned Roster Chaos Into Culture."

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Yray is reportedly responsible for helping dictate which players get what money, and the FSU roster is valued at around 20 million dollars. That’s much more than the teams they’ve been losing against. However, the reason they’ve been losing isn’t because they are less talented; it’s largely because they fail to play complementary football collectively on offense and defense. The latter probably shoulders much more of the blame for the four losses because some of the defensive play has been egregious.

At the same time, FSU should be recruiting at a much higher level across the board with the money spent, and where they are logistically to the top talent in the southeast.

Fan Response

Could FSU do a better job allocating resources and acquiring better talent? The coaching staff has to do a better job preparing these young men and getting them to buy in and play together like they did in the first three games this season. All of that goes back to player evaluations and development, and FSU seems to be missing the mark on guys more times than not with Darrick Yray as the GM.