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If 2023’s college football season gets only one story when we sit down to remember, that story might be Florida State. Despite Nick Saban’s retirement. Despite Michigan’s national championship. Despite everything Connor Stalions accomplished in his covert mission to Kalamazoo. (Fine, it was Central Michigan, and the game was in East Lansing. But no saga, triumph, or goodbye matched the emotion which Florida State’s playoff exclusion procured from the college football public. In the four-team playoff’s final year, fate conspired to break the four-team playoff. Florida State was left on the wrong side of the moat when the drawbridge went up.
In a few hours, over in Ireland, Florida State will kick off 2024’s college football season. It’s a strange prelude, the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, but it’s a convenient excuse to schedule one game of interest a week earlier than our annual Labor Day Weekend festival. Now in its third year of consecutive play, this game has seen Scott Frost’s Nebraska crumble against Northwestern and Sam Hartman’s Notre Dame sink the Navy Midshipmen. Today, it’s Florida State vs. Georgia Tech. With all due respect to Brent Key’s program, and we’ll get to it down below, the game is about Florida State.
This is a successful formula for the Aer Lingus College Football Classic: Find one big name that folks back home have questions about. Give people a reason to tune in. Give the game that big–time–college–football feel. With all due respect to SMU and Nevada, and we’ll get to them below as well, the Florida States and Nebraskas and Notre Dames of the world lend credibility to Week Zero. They make something more of the day than just a quirky game played on the greenest grass we’ll see all fall. College football fans will disagree on the newsworthiness of Hawaii vs. Delaware State. We can all agree that Florida State is a main character.
Florida State’s ridden quite the narrative rollercoaster over these last twelve months. It was September 3rd of last year when the Seminoles stomped LSU in Orlando, Mike Norvell’s program announcing its arrival to the national championship picture. Two weeks later, the panics began. Boston College nearly upset the ACC favorites after a Jordan Travis injury scare. Clemson missed a field goal which helped FSU to an overtime win. Things smoothed out from there, but there was something off about this team that had looked so dominant Week 1. Then, hell broke loose.
North Alabama also plays today, another nod by fate (or FCS schedulers) to the November drama that turned brother against brother and talk show host against talk show host. It was against the UNA Lions that Jordan Travis went down. The injury was catastrophic at the time, but Florida State—like the rest of us—was unprepared for how big its impact could be. Soon, the conference championships were here, and all of them went either perfectly right or perfectly wrong. We were left with five traditionally deserving playoff teams and four playoff spots. One of the five played in the worst power conference and had looked miserable offensively without their star QB.
This was not where the rollercoaster ended.
It’s interesting how quickly Florida State stopped being a sympathetic figure. For a week or two in December, Florida State’s snub was the talk of the American sports world. Then, players started opting out and hitting the portal, and FSU started rattling its saber at the ACC, and suddenly Georgia was beating a Seminole B-team by 60 points in Miami Gardens. In a span of 27 days, Florida State went from emblematizing Everything People Hate About College Football, as a victim, to emblematizing Everything People Hate About College Football, as a perpetrator.
It’s also interesting to look at where Florida State began last year, and where Florida State’s beginning this year, and where Florida State spent the months in between. With a few exceptions, the AP Poll is a good preseason barometer of the college football landscape.* Florida State began last season ranked 8th. It begins this year ranked 12th. With a few exceptions, our Movelor rating system (we’ll make its 2024 rankings public on Monday) is a good in-season barometer of the college football landscape. After beating LSU last year, Florida State ranked 9th. After beating Louisville, Florida State ranked 10th. By reasonable measures, Florida State has been itself the whole time, a team somewhere between the 5th and the 15th-best in the country. This is stable! This is consistent! This has not stopped perceptions of Florida State from blowing around like a Publix bag in a hurricane.
*AP voters know these teams really well. The preseason AP Top 25 has a lot of predictive value. Once games begin, though, AP voters stop trying to vote for the best teams. This would be fine, except they also don’t vote for the most accomplished teams. Their rubric is some undefined variable hybrid of good and accomplished with a heavy dose of recency bias thrown in and boosts sometimes given to teams with potent storylines. The AP Top 25 could be a great resource if it ever found a way to define what it was ranking.
Had Florida State caught a break—had Georgia beaten Alabama or had Washington dropped a game earlier in the year—we would be talking this weekend about a rising national contender, no matter how big the offseason turnover. Instead, Florida State is one of many playoff contenders who aren’t exactly national championship hopefuls.
Is this fair?
The thing that makes college football’s brand of competition so special is how long it takes to become a powerhouse. Aside from LSU in 2019, most national champions are not one-year phenomena (and LSU was hardly an out-of-nowhere program). College football’s is a slow build, more than is the case in any other American sport. There are exceedingly few flukes. We thought after that game in Orlando last September that Florida State had arrived. Even that, though, would have merely meant arriving to the scene of the winner-take-all brawl. Winning it would have been another task entirely. We thought Florida State was into that Georgia/Alabama/Michigan/Ohio State mix. It turned out, we were wrong. They were still a little football away.
Are they there yet? Probably not. Had Florida State caught that break and lost badly to Georgia in a playoff setting instead of in the Orange Bowl, their hype might be higher but their reality would be roughly the same. Florida State’s overall trendline under Norvell points upward. The year-to-year cycle of build and rebuild is on a downward swing. The collision between these trends has Florida State right about where they spent so much time last year: They’re good, but they’re not good enough yet. That’s the early read, anyway. Maybe they’ll surprise us. Maybe they’ll pull back up to the brawl.
What Florida State has going for them today on that green, green football field is defense. This is what Florida State had going for it last year as well. FSU was a strong defensive team. This is obvious when zooming in upon the memories—Florida State made life hell for Louisville that night in Charlotte—but it’s hard to wrap our heads around, with FSU’s most recent noteworthy moments before these coming in the Jameis Winston days. Specifically, there’s a lot of attention being paid to that front four, where Darrell Jackson has become every college football analyst’s favorite defensive tackle until further notice.
How does this match up with Georgia Tech? It might be tough for the Yellow Jackets. Brent Key has good things going, and Haynes King is a solid quarterback, and a second year under coordinator Buster Faulkner should help everybody out. Georgia Tech does not, however, have the same caliber of athletes as Florida State. They are not as big or as strong or as fast as the team lined up across from them. That’s going to be a problem.
If Faulkner does manage to out-scheme the FSU defense and steal enough possessions to make this a ballgame, the odds will still be a little long. Florida State’s offense enjoys many of the same athletic gifts as its defense. DJ Uiagalelei might never be what he was supposed to be at Clemson, but he doesn’t need to be for Florida State to win the ACC. If he can maintain his performance from 2022 at Clemson or 2023 at Florida State (22 and 21 TD’s, respectively; 7 INT’s both seasons), that should leave the Seminoles still clearly in control, even if King and Faulkner pitch a perfect game. Florida State should be able to bowl over the Georgia Tech defense. It just needs to hold onto the football while it does that. It’s not expected to be a blowout—Georgia Tech is scrappy enough to deserve respect, like a cornered fox protecting its kits—but it will probably take a moderate to big turnover margin in the Yellow Jackets’ favor for an upset to materialize.
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Other games you might find yourself watching today:
Montana State at New Mexico
The Bobcats have grown into one of the FCS’s best programs in recent years. They’re not what North Dakota State was, or what South Dakota State is, but they could hold their own against the majority of FBS teams, and they could probably beat half of them. New Mexico is one of the worst FBS teams out there.
Why is New Mexico so bad, when similar schools (Wyoming; New Mexico eight years ago) do just fine? The short version is that Danny Gonzales inherited a deteriorated situation and never found a way to turn it around. Now, it’s in Bronco Mendenhall’s hands, with today marking the former BYU and Virginia head coach’s first game back since 2021.
SMU at Nevada
Is SMU going to win the ACC? Maybe, to be honest. All it would take would be Florida State disappointing and then a few well-timed Mustang wins.
That said, don’t get too impressed by anything you see today. Nevada, like New Mexico, is debuting a new head coach, and not because the old guy won too many games. Tough times for Mountain West teams named after wolves.
Delaware State at Hawaii
I think this is one of those Hawaii games where you have to download a specific app and complete quizzes about June Jones and Magnum P.I. in order to watch. Unless you’re in Hawaii. If you’re in Hawaii, it should be on TV. They have their own ESPN there?
McNeese at Tarleton State
North Alabama vs. Southeast Missouri State
Florida A&M vs. Norfolk State
Not a bad set of FCS games. Tarleton finally finished their Division I transition, making them playoff-eligible, and they’re among the UAC favorites. (The UAC’s the conference the ASUN and WAC combined to build for football.)
Fellow UAC member North Alabama plays SEMO at the Cramton Bowl, and honestly, if you’re wanting to be The Guy Who’ll Watch Any College Football, this will do more for you than obtaining whatever malware’s necessary to watch the Rainbow Warriors. It’s easier to watch (on ESPN, happening at a time when most of the country is awake). It should be better football (Delaware State is bad). SEMO is a smaller deal than Hawaii, meaning it will look weirder to others that you’re watching it (people know what Hawaii is). Also, everyone is moderately concerned about the guy who knows what the Cramton Bowl is. I think that’s what you people are after. The moderate concern of your peers. (The Cramton Bowl’s where they host the Camellia Bowl. And the FCS Kickoff, of course.)
In the MEAC/SWAC Challenge, Norfolk State represents the MEAC while FAMU carries the banner for the SWAC. The SWAC’s doing better than the MEAC these days. Look at poor Delaware State this evening if you would like an example of that.
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We’ll be back tomorrow with reactions to anything noteworthy that happens today, plus a look back at the offseason, to remind ourselves and anyone else who needs it what exactly happened back in January. Then, a big season preview on Monday and Tuesday.
Bark.
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