Every year college football brings new story lines and memes, and with the latter I refer to the original definition of it: an idea that seems to have a life of its own, reproducing and evolving as it jumps from person to person.
There are a lot of great ones, which is part of what makes the sport so fun to follow. There are also a lot of bad ones, because lazy “analysis” is easier than good analysis.
Recently there has been a run of schools firing coaches after two years. Some make total sense, like Arkansas firing Chad Morris after he went 0-8 in SEC play in his first season and then began 0-6 in his second. Bret Bielema didn’t leave behind that big a mess. The Hogs bounced right back under Sam Pittman, too. Good luck finding anyone who thought Morris got a raw deal.
There were also some less defensible moves, like Mississippi State firing Joe Moorhead. He was a step down from Dan Mullen, but Mullen was the best coach in school history. At least they managed to upgrade by hiring Mike Leach. The pirate will never beat Saban, but at least he will keep a high floor.
Anyway, there has been a lot of hand wringing about the proliferation of two-year tenures. Coaches have been getting ever shorter leashes around the sport, so I think some people thought we had fallen down further on a slippery slope. It used to be guys always got into their third seasons, but now maybe they might only get two? Outrageous!
That is the soil in which the worst take of the 2022 season took root and bloomed: that Mike Norvell’s success at FSU this year was proof of the virtue of patience.
I can’t remember the first time I saw it. It might’ve been as early as after his Week 1 win over LSU, but I think it was more a week or two later when the team started 3-0 or 4-0. It certainly was before the Seminoles’ first loss on October 1 to Wake Forest. It hibernated for a bit while the team lost three straight to Wake, NC State, and Clemson, but it was back in force during the telecast of the Florida-FSU game.
I will try to best represent this view before I rightfully eviscerate it.
Norvell went 8-13 in his first two seasons in Tallahassee, missing a bowl both times. FSU is a program that expects to go to a bowl, so that might’ve been seen as a fireable offense. Instead, they showed patience by staying the course, and he rewarded the administration with much improved third season. They passed the eye test by just looking a lot better on the field, and they ended the regular season with a nice 9-3 record, a No. 15 ranking, and wins over rivals Florida and Miami plus SEC West champ LSU. The last of those even gives the program a transitive win over Alabama.
Okay, that’s enough. I hope you didn’t throw up in your mouth while reading that. Here’s the actual truth of the matter: FSU didn’t have a choice but to give Norvell a third season.
After all, the very same Florida State University was one of the schools that fired a coach before his second season was up. They just did that to Willie Taggart before hiring Norvell!
That pink slip is somewhere between Morris and Moorhead on the spectrum of justification, but no matter which end you think it’s closer to, they still canned Taggart nine games into his sophomore campaign. That’s not patience! That’s the kind of thing that sparked the moral panic that led to this bogus Norvell/patience narrative in the first place!
FSU is not swimming in cash. It doesn’t have as big an alumni base as the biggest public schools out there, and its lack of a medical school until relatively late (started in 2000) means it doesn’t have as many wealthy boosters as a place like UF does. It also had instability in the administration across the late Fisher to Taggart eras, which is something that hinders fundraising. It is especially so when the administration is not always aligned with the booster organization.
So unless Norvell was as bad as Morris (a very low bar, and he wasn’t) or did something bad enough to get fired for cause (so no buyout), FSU was never going to fire him before his third season. They didn’t have the money and weren’t going to be able to get it from a fractured community of stakeholders.
And then, once Norvell’s third season started off on a 4-0 streak, it still wasn’t proof of the virtue of patience. It was going to be a prove-it year for him, and he proved it. “It” being that he could do better than the school has since Fisher’s final year, which again is a low bar but one he had to clear. But anyway, because Norvell cleared it, FSU didn’t need to demonstrate patience to not fire him. Not firing him becomes the default action.
It’s not every season we get a story line this asinine, but 2022 delivered. FSU showed it actually lacks patience with its firing of Taggart, and its dysfunction meant they couldn’t fire Norvell as quickly unless he was so awful as to unite the warring parties against him. Hopefully we won’t hear anything so dumb next year.