FSU in Crisis: Shocking Mistakes and Player Failures Lead to Devastating Loss Against Mustangs
Have the Florida State Seminoles (1-4, 1-3 ACC) hit rock bottom yet? It’s hard to say with so much of the season left to play.
What is clear is the Seminoles are among the worst teams in the power conferences, and their offense ranks second-worst by EPA.
This Whiteboard Review won’t be like previous ones, because honestly, there’s nothing new to write. Sure, I could break down specific plays from this SMU game and analyze who missed a block, threw an interception, or busted coverage, but there’s no value in that. Not at this stage.
There are deep systemic issues within this program. A classic saying goes, “Games aren’t won on gamedays, they’re won in the offseason and during the week.” Well, FSU didn’t just miss out on free agents in the portal this past offseason. They lost everywhere, starting with the coaches.
How did they misjudge their own team so badly in the offseason? They built a scheme around the running game and deep shots with an offensive line that can’t run block or hold up in pass protection. How did Norvell give summer interviews saying the OL would be the best since he arrived in Tallahassee?
The offensive line is bad. Really bad. There’s no energy or power in the run game. They are slow. They get whipped in pass protection. Their protection schemes are easily beaten with blitz packages. They commit a litany of dumb penalties.
The defensive line has supposedly good players who refuse to set the edge against the run week after week. Linebackers can’t fit the run and are exposed in one-on-one coverage multiple times. Defensive backs are constantly out of position and bust coverages, but seem content not to communicate with each other.
Where is the coaching? Where is the pride?
The 4th-and-goal call right before halftime was terrible. Not that Norvell went for it — that was the right decision. But the play call itself. He called QB Power, running behind their worst offensive lineman, who was pulling directly into the strength of the SMU front, with a plodding QB who isn’t healthy and goes down immediately on contact.
Please. Make it make sense.
A few years after brilliantly scheming an offense out of the worst Power 5 offensive line in the country, how can the play calls halfway into this season be explained by a staff that thinks their offensive line is much better than it is?
The offense reeks of coaching malpractice. The defense is rife with individualism. The team is soft all around. They make business decisions during games, and the coaches still won’t make business decisions about who deserves playing time. We are rewarded in the postgame with empty rhetoric about “evaluating everything.”
I love watching a quarterback throw the ball six yards out of bounds when a checkdown could pick up some yardage. I live for passes into triple coverage. I die inside watching the QB take a sack while the receivers are halfway through their routes.
And do not mistake any potential quarterback change for an improvement. It might look different, but that doesn’t mean better. Besides the coaching, the biggest problem — aside from cultural rot — is the offense. The core issue is the offensive line. This is probably the worst Florida State offense in more than four decades. Despite a drop in talent from last season, there’s still too much talent for the offense to be this bad.
The program is looking at a multi-year rebuild, and that’s if wholesale changes are made at the end of the season.
Through five games there’s been little to no indication from the head coach or offensive staff that they even have an appetite for playing younger players. Except, of course, at tight end when the sixth embarrassing drop under the lights puts you into garbage time against a former G5. Injury may force their hand at QB, but they otherwise seem content to stay the course, especially among the offensive line.
It’s one thing to be wildly wrong about your own team. It’s another to be stubborn about how wrong you were. The next time Osceola spears the turf at Doak Campbell it will be Norvell’s goodwill burning on the end of it. The thing about playing for the future is it carries with it hope for a better day. Norvell’s gets cloudier by the day.