Football season 2024 has been a rough one at the fort. My New England Patriots opened with a surprise victory over the Cincinnati Bengals and lost every game since, playing worse in every succeeding game.
The Florida State Seminoles, sad to say, are on very same path. They didn’t win their first game — a loss in Ireland to Georgia Tech — but outside of a fluky win over Cal, they’ve played worse as the year has gone along, too. Like at Duke. Ugh!
And maybe it’s bad form to use this word after the profusion of water dumped on us and much of the Eastern Seaboard over the last few weeks, but we seem to be in a drought. A talent drought. A program drought. A coaching drought, too?
Whatever’s going on with this football team, don’t blame HIM! (As in the Man Upstairs)
Fans in both places — New England and in Florida, and elsewhere — are irate, indignant, even, at the shoddy play of both teams. Watching the ugly loss in London, Patriots’ fans were wondering how bad will this get? A one-sided loss to a previously lost cause Jacksonville Jaguars (1-5) team across the sea will make you do that.
Similarly, the Seminoles traveled up to Duke and evidently forgot there were rules to the game. FOUR offsides penalties? Isn’t that the first thing you learn when you start to play football? And there were missed assignments and snap counts and dropped passes and if they missed the team bus on the way to the airport, would any of us been surprised?
Dr. King once famously said “the arc of history bends towards justice.” Applied to football teams, it might read, “the arc of history for teams that have kicked ass for years bends towards them somewhere down the line getting their own ass kicked.” Which certainly seems to be what’s happening now.
Call it karma, fate, destiny, bad luck, lousy drafts (or signings), bad hires, whatever the reason might be, what Bill Belichick and Bobby Bowden were able to do for unprecedently long periods of time in a highly competitive sport just won’t happen ever again.
Nick Saban didn’t exactly leave the cupboard bare at Alabama when he opted to take a seat next to Pat McAfee on Saturday mornings instead of yelling at people and referees on the sidelines, but the Tide has been rolled out TWICE, including once by VANDERBILT. (This is not a misprint.)
New England Patriots’ first-year coach Jerod Mayo at least has the excuse of a series of awful Belichick drafts, he’s in his first year so he’s learning and some awful injuries and player absences, trying to match up quality NFL talent with Patriot players who’d likely be second- or third-stringers on other teams. But you can learn the snap count and remember that sticking your hand in the other guy’s facemask might be warranted in your mind but not recommended.
The nation’s football writers evidently did not think the cupboard was left bare for Mike Norvell and his Florida State Seminoles, ranking them pre-season No. 10, even after the exodus of all that first-line talent to the NFL. As we all would agree, if there is NFL-caliber talent on this team — other than maybe the punter and kicker — they’ve had their Halloween disguise on since the start of the season.
Being outplayed because of a lack of talent is understandable. Losing games because of penalties, dropped passes, lack of effort and especially consistency on either side of the ball, well, that comes back to coaching, doesn’t it? The coaches can’t block or tackle or catch for them.
But if they can’t coach and teach and hold them accountable to a better performance once a week (and remember: FSU have THREE bye weeks for additional coaching time!) then maybe they ought not to be coaching. Or not coaching here, where the expectations — set by Robert Cleckler Bowden — is FSU will always be a national contender.
To me, it seemed Jimbo Fisher was able to ride the echoes of Bowden’s winning momentum and Jameis Winston to a national title and last season, Norvell was able to finally see the wonderful growth and leadership that it seemed he’d been building towards with Jordan Travis.
With the addition of some fruitful portal selections, the Seminoles found their way back into the national hunt again and restored the program to its lofty status, no small feat after the brutal departure of Fisher and what he left in his wake and then, the abomination of— “How many men can we put on the field at one time?” — Willie Taggart’s mercifully brief run, maybe one of the most wrong-headed coaching choices in college football history.
But now, last year’s FSU season looks like a fluke, a lucky confluence of talent, some good finds and some big-time playmakers. When you read fans comparing Norvell to Taggart, some even suggesting overmatched Willie was better, well… that seat’s getting pretty hot, maybe too hot for him to stick around.
So, maybe both programs are in a bit of a drought for all sorts of reasons, not just coaching. It does happen, even to legendary franchises. The New York Yankees will open their first World Series in 15 years on Friday. In college football, look at what happened to Nebraska and Oklahoma, just last week when both programs seemed to be righting the ship.
Even down in Gainesville, who in the world could have forecast the Gators’ Jekyll/Hyde season? Talk about unpredictable. It’s everywhere in sports. There are no dynasties, other than maybe Oklahoma women’s softball (four straight titles).
Having lived here for 32 years, I get the impatience, the expectation. And being a New England Patriots fan for even longer than that, it’s tough getting your butt handed to you again and again and again, especially since you’ve been the one doing the handing for all those years.
It’s not a particularly comforting thought but things DO have to get better at some point, don’t they? Is THIS the bottom? Can we keep hope alive?
As a Patriots’ fan, I don’t see a lot of signs that they’re going to turn things around anytime soon. I like the rookie quarterback from North Carolina, Drake Maye. But there’s not much else there just yet.
As for the ‘Noles, other than watching the punter slam the hell out of the ball on fourth down and hope they somehow get close enough for Ryan Fitzgerald to try a this-side-of-the-moon field goal, they can’t run or pass or catch, which tends to limit your offense. How much of this ineptitude falls on Norvell and his staff and how much falls on the effort/focus/performance of each individual player every time he pulls that honored uniform on, we’ll have to see.
So yeah, it’s been a tough year at the fort. Now I know how my childhood hero Davy Crockett felt at the Alamo.