FSU football: 3 thoughts on FSU coaches receiving contract extensions

Final Thoughts

I can understand why some folks wanted Mike Norvell to make changes on the staff. It boils down to what you believe is the most important, and college football is at another crossroads with the transfer portal. Mike Norvell has arguably been the most effective user of the transfer portal over the past few seasons. He was ahead of the curve and not afraid to trust what he thought was the quickest way to get FSU to a championship level team when folks criticized him for his high school recruiting classes in the first few years at FSU. It took a while, but they finally saw the vision. This team is still in a transitional state due to the nature in how he improved it. Here's what we do know. Mike Norvell has used the transfer portal excellently while progressively improving high school recruiting. However, it's still a marriage of improving high school recruiting and using the transfer portal to plug holes on the roster as they continue to raise the overall roster talent. It's a formula that had FSU on a 19-game winning streak. There's recruiting to have high recruiting rankings(Mario Cristobal and Jimbo Fisher in his latter FSU years), and there's recruiting to fill roster needs and guys that fit your core systems to maximize success.

Have you ever wondered why Jimbo could never win anything after winning the National Title at FSU despite multiple top-five recruiting classes at FSU and at Texas A&M? Have you ever wondered why Mario Cristobal doesn't win anything unless he had a first round draft pick he inherited at QB? Mike Norvell doesn't care about recruiting rankings. He's looking for the guys that want to be at FSU, and fit the systems they have in place. We can't use methods from 10 or even five-years ago to assess if he's doing it right. The recruiting landscape is much different now, and there's no reason to continue to measure things the same way as we did then. Let's wait and see how it shakes out before criticizing a man that's given FSU fans a ton to cheer for over the past two seasons. He has much more information at his disposal to assist in making decisions than any fan that thinks they know everything.