Florida State football had their previous General Manager Darrick Yray navigate over to the UCLA Bruins. The West Coast is where he is most comfortable, so it fits that he moved back over there. The fan base used him as a scape goat of the failures over the last couple of years, for good or bad.
While I don't think that Yray should have been the talking point with everything bad happening at Florida State, the portal evaluations over the past two offseasons were horrendous.
The transfer portal window is coming up in a hurry, so the Seminoles needed to have someone in place to man the General Manager position. Head football coach Mike Norvell cannot keep playing "double duty". Some of the fan base is already ready to give up on him.
On Saturday morning, On3's Warchant reported that the Seminoles have found their next hire for General Manager, and it is someone who has already been employed at Florida State in former Duke General Manager John Garrett (brother of former NFL coach Jason Garrett and son of former NFL coach Jim Garrett).
Garrett has already been on staff at Florida State from 2022 to 2023, where he was the Director of Scouting on Offense. Overall, his biggest impact came when he was named the General Manager of Player Personnel at Duke.
As we know, the Blue Devils won an ACC Championship this past season. The biggest reason why Duke won the conference was because of their pickup of star quarterback Darian Mensah from Tulane in the transfer portal.
According to ESPN Stats and Information, Mensah completed 67.9% of his passes with 3,646 passing yards and had 30 touchdowns with only five interceptions.
The willingness to be aggressive for elite talent at key positions such as quarterback has me intrigued to see if Garrett could implement the same strategy here in Tallahassee. Overall, there are rumors that the Seminoles could pursue UNLV transfer Anthony Colandrea.
I wonder if Colandrea would move the needle for the Seminoles during the 2026 season with all the stellar options in the portal. However, this is a good sign that Florida State isn't going into the transfer window without a General Manager.