In 2021, when Michael Alford was hired as the athletic director at Florida State, you could already feel the winds of change in college sports. Yet, Alford chose to ignore them.
While Mike Norvell is the one on the hot seat, Alford’s missteps and archaic way of thinking are one of the biggest reasons Florida State football has gone 7-17 over the last two seasons, and why its non-revenue sports are bleeding top talent like ACC Softball Player of the Year Isa Torres, who committed to Texas out of the Transfer Portal on Tuesday.
The first-team All-American shortstop isn’t the only key contributor departing from the Seminoles’ ACC Championship roster, either. Jaysoni Beachum has entered the transfer portal and is flirting with Florida, so one of FSU’s best power bats could make her way to an in-state rival soon.
In a vacuum, those decisions may look like veteran stars leaving for a better chance to win a national championship, but they’re emblematic of bigger systemic issues in Tallahassee, and symptoms of Alford’s catastrophic miscalculation.
Michael Alford’s bad bets have crippled Florida State
Traditionally, in college sports, because you couldn’t pay the players, at least legally, you had to find other ways to entice them to come to your school. It was a constant arms race to improve facilities, enhance stadiums, and spend money in every conceivable way other than on the athletes that determined wins and losses. That includes massive coaching salaries.
Now, the spending on coaches hasn’t stopped, and that’s in large part because they serve as major fundraisers, either actively or by injecting excitement into the program. Still, in the past, the reason to overpay a head coach, in any sport, was because they could get you the best talent. Now, you just pay the talent. Unless you’re Michael Alford.
Since taking over FSU athletics in 2021, Alford has spent big on coaching salaries, including handing Mike Norvell a massive contract extension and hiring head baseball coach Link Jarrett away from Notre Dame. On top of that, he opted to spend $138 million on the new Dunlap Football Center and $265 million on a renovation to Doak Campbell Stadium.
That’s the pre-NIL playbook for how to improve an athletic department, and though the NIL era began in earnest about the time he took over in 2021, just five years ago, it’s already an archaic process. And, to make matters worse, even as Alford realized he was swimming upstream against the athletic departments that were bolstering their NIL operations and spending the money where it really counts, on the field, Alford doubled down on a belief that the revenue-sharing cap, set at just over $20 million for the entire athletic department to directly pay players and established by the House vs. NCAA settlement in 2025, would be a hard cap.
Serious contenders are spending nearly, and in some cases upwards of, $50 million on their football roster alone, much of it from third-party NIL deals rarely ever flagged by the College Sports Commission’s NILGO clearinghouse. Alford was prepared to spend that $20 million or so limit for his entire athletic department, and expected everyone else to follow suit.
That miscalculation has left Norvell’s tenure to die on the vine, some of which was his own doing, and now is having trickle-down effects on Florida State’s other sports. Florida State certainly can’t match Texas’s spending on football, but now it seems they can’t compete with their offers for top softball talent either. Until it's fixed, which will take some time because an athletic department turns more like an oil tanker than a jet ski, the Seminoles will continue to be a stepping stone and a feeder program to the real contenders.
Torres is heading home, returning to Texas after three years at Florida State, and she's joining the back-to-back national champions, so there are bigger reasons than just money for her departure. But you've got your head buried even further in the sand than Alford if you don't think the Longhorns oubid the Noles.
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