Florida State makes the place stink

Labor Day weekend marks the official start of the college football season. The leaves are changing, the temperatures are dropping, and we’re getting our first glimpse of the contenders for one of the 12 playoff spots. Earlier this season, some teams showed surprising promise, like USC. Others have already made a bold statement, like Notre Dame and Miami. Some started slow but are still in the race, like defending champion Michigan. And then there’s FSU.

After Florida State was unfairly (yes) left out of the playoffs last year, the team not only lost all of its stars to graduation and the draft in the offseason, but also made a ton of whining and threatening gestures, much to the dismay of everyone else. The school’s enemies and haters certainly took delight in the Seminoles following all that bluster by blowing their first two games of the new season. FSU didn’t just blow it, they looked awful the entire time. DJ Uiagalelei has somehow gotten worse since transferring from Oregon State, receivers are dropping passes, the defense is being overrun by ACC “powerhouses” Georgia Tech and Boston College, and plays on both sides of the ball have been anemic.

On Monday, in Boston College’s 28-13 victory over the Seminoles, BC quarterback Thomas Castellanos looked like the reincarnation of Louisville-era Lamar Jackson. Bill O’Brien’s Eagles controlled the ball for 14 of the first quarter’s 15 minutes and finished with 263 total rushing yards. Meanwhile, Uiagalelei completed 21 of 42 passes for 272 yards, including FSU’s only touchdown, a 29-yard pass to Kentron Poitier, the team’s only sign of life. But even those subpar numbers don’t really convey how miserable Uiagalelei looked on the field, missing completely open receivers and overdoing it on long passes after every pass went behind the line of scrimmage in the opening play. It’s a sign that this coaching staff has no idea what to do.

“I think it’s really crazy how this season started,” FSU coach Mike Norvell said afterward. “I failed to prepare the team to go to the bench tonight and react.”

I’ll say it. Ardent Defector readers may recall that your boy here is not only an FSU alumnus and fan, but also a noted Mike Norvell skeptic who is completely unimpressed by the past two years of apparent success, including an undefeated 2023 season. Many of the reasons I have remained a nonbeliever were made clear in the past week. Mike Norvell is not an inventive playmaker, nor do his teams have a good sense of the rhythm of a game. Mike Norvell teams are sloppy even when they play well. While the arguments against Florida State’s undefeated 2023 season are hypocritical and largely beside the point, they were accurate in noting that FSU never truly dominated its competition and often relied too heavily on the heroics of Jordan Travis. While many fans were quick to dismiss Georgia’s utter dominance over them in the Sugar Bowl, it did show how underdeveloped Norvell’s roster was outside of the stars. But most importantly in the context of college football, Mike Norvell is an average scout — he can’t compete with the best programs FSU is supposedly on par with and struggles to get five-star ratings or break into the top 10 of any recruiting class.

Norvell is trying to make up for that through the transfer portal. Granted, he used that tool exceptionally well at Florida State. But the portal is most effective when it comes to optimizing a team, not building one. Filling roster holes, adding depth, or grabbing a potential star or two in the portal is one thing; trying to get out of mediocre recruiting classes by hoping a few transfers will fix everything is another. And as evidenced by what we’re seeing on the field, Norvell and his coaches aren’t exactly doing a great job of developing these players, whether he signed them straight out of high school or from another college program.

As much as I enjoy the feeling of intellectual superiority, I don’t feel good about having my doubts about Norvell confirmed, especially since FSU just restructured his contract to give him as much money as Nick Saban through 2031, all because he screwed my school and made everyone think he was seriously in the running to succeed Saban at Bama, which would only have happened if everyone at Bama was as stupid as Paul Finebaum’s show made them out to be. And so here we are, stuck with Norvell at an impossibly high number while we try to sue our way out of the ACC and get some kind of private equity money. Thankfully, we’re only two games into the college football season. We haven’t even scratched the surface of how bad things could get.