Breaking news: Florida state Seminoles set to part ways with million mega Five-Star..

Breaking news: Florida state Seminoles set to part ways with million mega Five-Star..

It was easy to wonder if there might be a little bit of a hangover this season. Mike Norvell weathered a strange, stair-stepping climb to greatness with Florida State — his Seminoles went 3-10 in his first 13 games, then 9-6 in the next 15, then won 19 in a row — but endured one of the most gut-wrenching season finishes you’ll ever see. First, the unbeaten Noles were snubbed out of a spot in the final four-team College Football Playoff; then, with a number of starters having either opted out or opted for season-ending surgery, they got completely humiliated 63-3 by Georgia in the Orange Bowl.

Norvell said all the proper things in spring ball, and despite 14 new starters, his reputation for finding difference-makers in the transfer portal got FSU ranked 10th in the preseason AP poll. But instead of a hangover, or a slow start, his Noles have completely no-showed in 2024.

Florida State’s win percentage has fallen by 82.9 percentage points at the moment, from 0.929 to 0.100. In the history of top-division college football, there have been 14,788 teams; only three have had their win percentage fall by more than that, and two played during World War I: 1917 Colorado State (from 6-0-1 to 0-7-1), 1919 Colorado Mines (from 4-0 to 0-4-2) and 2012 Southern Miss (from 12-2 to 0-12). The Seminoles are likely to finish 2-10, beating Charleston Southern this coming weekend and then losing to rival Florida. Those results would drop them to merely the eighth-largest win percentage collapse ever, behind four more teams from 1950 or earlier.

If you prefer advanced stats, FSU has also cratered by that measure: The Seminoles finished ninth in SP+ last season but are currently 92nd. In terms of percentile ratings, they’ve fallen from 94.1% to 33.0%. Granted, there’s still a sliver of friendly preseason projections impacting the current ratings, so the Noles could fall even further over the last couple of games, but that 61.1% drop is still the 40th largest on record and the fourth largest of the 2000s behind 2018 Louisville (from 87.8% to 15.1%), 2012 Southern Miss (from 73.1% to 4.5%) and 2009 Ball State (from 75.6% to 12.5%).

Like FSU with Jordan Travis, all three of those 21st century peers lost star quarterbacks from breakthrough teams — Southern Miss lost Conference USA-winning Austin Davis, Ball State lost Nate Davis and Louisville lost Heisman winner Lamar Jackson — and both BSU (Brady Hoke) and Southern Miss (Larry Fedora) had lost their respective head coaches to bigger jobs. Louisville, meanwhile, ended the Bobby Petrino era 10 games into 2018, as his Cardinals kept getting worse and worse.

Norvell isn’t a first-year coach, and by all accounts it appears he will keep his job into 2025, even if it has required the jettisoning of assistants. I like turning to the history books to get an idea for what might happen in the future, but this one’s tricky: When a team collapses with this level of force, it’s usually at either the start or end of a coach’s tenure (or, in the case of Southern Miss’ Ellis Johnson in 2012, both).

Acknowledging both the uniqueness of the coaching situation and the severity of the fall, however, I did find 10 reasonably decent comps. Here are 10 postwar, major-conference teams (or major independents) that (a) collapsed by at least 50.0% in terms of both SP+ percentile rating and win percentage, (b) did so with a coach that was not in his first season and (c) kept that coach for the following season. How long did it take each program to rebound? Did it happen under the same coach? Let’s take a look