Labor Day weekend means the official start of the college football season. The leaves are changing, the temperature is dropping, and we get our first sense of the contenders for one of the now 12 spots in the playoff. At the start of this season, some teams have shown surprising promise, like USC. Others have already made an emphatic statement, like Notre Dame and Miami. Some have started slow but are still in the fight, like defending champs Michigan. And then there's FSU.
After unfairly (yes) getting left off of last year's playoff, Florida State spent the offseason not just losing all their stars to graduation and the draft, but also doing a whole lot of bellyaching and threat-making, much to the consternation of everyone else. The school's enemies and haters are surely delighting in seeing the Seminoles follow up all that bluster by blowing their first two games of the new season. Not only has FSU blown it, they've looked horrid all along the way. DJ Uiagalelei has somehow gotten worse after transferring over from Oregon State, the receivers are dropping passes, the defense is getting run all over by ACC "powerhouses" Georgia Tech and Boston College, and the play calling on both sides of the ball has been anemic.
On Monday, in Boston College's 28-13 rout of 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-minute runtime, and ended the game with 263 total rushing yards. Meanwhile, Uiagalelei completed 21-of-42 passes for 272 yards, including FSU's lone touchdown, a 29-yard pass to Kentron Poitier, the team's only sign of life. But not even those subpar numbers can truly capture how abysmal Uiagalelei looked out there, missing wide open receivers and overdoing it with deep passes after an opening game where every pass was behind the line of scrimmage. It's a sign that this coaching staff has no idea what to do.
"Sick to how this season started," FSU coach Mike Norvell said afterward. "I failed in preparing the team to be able to go out and respond tonight."
I'll say. Ardent Defector readers might remember that not only is your boy here an FSU alum and fan, but also a noted Mike Norvell skeptic, totally unmoved by the last two years of ostensible success, including an undefeated 2023 season. A lot of the reasons I remained a non-believer have been evident this past week. Mike Norvell is not an inventive playcaller, nor do his teams have great feel for the rhythms of a game. Mike Norvell teams are sloppy even when they're doing well. The case against Florida State's undefeated 2023 season, while hypocritical and mostly besides the point, was accurate in observing that FSU never exactly dominated their competition, and often depended too much on Jordan Travis's heroics. While many fans were quick to dismiss Georgia's complete domination over them in the Orange Bowl, it did show just how underdeveloped Norvell's roster was outside of the stars. But most importantly in the context of college football, Mike Norvell is an average recruiter—unable to keep up with the best programs FSU is supposed to be in league with, struggling to get five-stars or to break into the top 10 of any given recruiting class.
Norvell tries to make up for this through the transfer portal. Admittedly, he has used that tool exceptionally well at Florida State. But the portal is most effective as a way of fine-tuning a team, not as a way of building one. Filling gaps in the roster, shoring up depth, or snatching up a potential star or two in the portal is one thing; trying to bail yourself out of mediocre recruiting classes by hoping some transfers can fix it all is another. Plus, as evidenced by what we're seeing on the field, Norvell and his coaches are not exactly doing a great job of developing any of these players, no matter if he signed them out of high school or from another college program.
As much as I enjoy the feeling of intellectual superiority, I do not feel good about being vindicated for my Norvell doubts, especially since FSU just restructured his contract to give him Nick Saban–style money until 2031, all because he played my school like a fiddle and made everyone believe he was seriously in the running to replace Saban at Bama, which only would've happened if everyone at Bama really is as stupid as Paul Finebaum's show makes them out to be. And so, we are now stuck with Norvell at an impossibly high number as we try to sue ourselves out of the ACC and into some sort of private equity money. Luckily, we're only two games into the college football season. We haven't even scratched the surface on just how bad things could get.
