One of the biggest questions for FSU football going into the Wake Forest game was whether the players would play hard for Mike Norvell after losing four straight games and knowing he might be on the brink of getting fired if he lost Saturday night.
The Noles demolished Wake Forest 49-7, and several players were sure to voice their support of Mike Norvell when they spoke with the media immediately after the game:
Earl Little Jr.: "I want to give a big shoutout to Coach Norvell, I know a lot of people are against him right now. ...We're going to keep fighting for him.”
Jabrill Rawls: “Coach Norvell, just him coming in every day and him not giving up on us, how he loves us, how he pushes us to the best of our ability each and every day. He don’t short us not a day, how he loves us, and we just all come together as one.”
Thomas Castellanos: “Fire coach? Nah, nah. Coach Norvell has been awesome." “Everybody blames the coaches? That’s on us, tonight, we showed, I’m glad we got that done for him. It’s New November.”
Thoughts
My first thought is it’s great to see the players still supporting him and playing like they cared on Saturday night. My second thought is, why didn’t they play like that against Stanford? I still like Mike Norvell as a person, and have no doubt he cares deeply for FSU and the players.
However, the variance in what we get week in and week out is too high. If we could get a guarantee that the players would play hard every game, that might change my feelings. However, the results could have been very different if FSU had played a team with better quarterback play Saturday night.
The defense still has massive holes, and Wake Forest got multiple chunk plays that were called back due to penalties. Wake Forest quarterbacks were inaccurate when guys were wide open, and Wake Forest receivers did FSU a favor by dropping some passes that were on target as well.
We wrote about how Wake Forest had limitations on offense, so some of the defensive success feels like fool’s gold. A win is a win, but Clemson’s probably gonna put up a lot of points next week unless they somehow fix those issues this week.