This story was originally published by Dead Spin
The 2024 college football season has a renewed feeling of excitement as more teams genuinely have a chance at cracking the expanded, 12-team college football playoff.
We can eliminate Florida State from that conversation.
The Seminoles came into the season as the No. 10 ranked team in the nation, according to the AP rankings.
They started off the season with an absolute stinker in Ireland at the hands of unranked Georgia Tech.
You could make some excuses. It was the first game of the season all the way across the globe. Even Pat McAfee was wasted during his show and ESPN’s College GameDay.
But Florida State followed up that miserable performance with an even worse performance on Labor Day, losing 28-13 to Boston College.
Sure, Boston College has Bill O’Brien as their head coach. They were motivated as hell. But they were also 16.5-point underdogs going into that game.
Seminoles quarterback DJ Uiagalelei was an unmitigated nightmare. You’d think a college quarterback in his fifth season would have learned a thing or two, but he was a mess out there, missing wide open receivers left and right.
It’s nothing short of a miracle that Seminoles head coach Mike Norvell did not just pull him and give a freshman QB a try. You never want to hear a coach apologize to fans two weeks into the season, but that’s exactly what we have with Florida State.
You can make an argument that if the Seminoles run the table, they can still work themselves back into the conversation for this 12-team playoff. And while it’s a plausible argument, Florida State has not given any reason for anyone to believe that they’ll start winning games.
They’ve officially dropped out of the AP Top 25 this week.
Back-to-back stinkers on national television is a surefire way to lose supporters. Mercifully, they do not play again until September 14th against Memphis, which should be another winnable game. Before Halloween, the Seminoles will be tested against ranked Clemson and Miami, Florida.
You have to believe that Norvell can rally the troops and figure a thing or two out by then with three winnable games before that Clemson game. But so far, this team has been vomit-inducing.
This college football season has been a treat thus far. Other disappointments include LSU getting outright upset by USC and Brian Kelly slamming the table in an epic postgame meltdown. Georgia is one tough cookie, but Dabo Swinney and Clemson, who still refuse to embrace the transfer portal and NIL, were trounced 34-3 to begin their season.
It’s the first week of September, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a perfect college football team. But what we’ve seen out of Florida State these first two weeks has been nothing short of embarrassing, especially after they crowned themselves as National Champions when they were snubbed from the playoff last season with a 13-1 record.
