The 2020 football season was an unusual one for first-year Florida State head coach Mike Norvell.
Hardly any fans were in attendance to watch his Seminoles. There were also fewer games than usual on his schedule — just nine, to be exact. A constant cloud was hanging over his head that any game could either be postponed or canceled entirely because of COVID-19 protocols. There was constant worry that any player could be deemed unfit to play at any point in time, too.
Those were things every coach had to deal with, though. The circumstances weren’t unique to Norvell. But on top of it all, the coach’s 2020 season was different for another reason. It was just the second year since 2012 in which the team Norvell was associated with finished with more losses than wins. Florida State went 3-6.
It had been trending that way for some time for FSU, and there wasn’t much Norvell could do about it in year one. After a stretch of five straight seasons with at least 10 wins under Jimbo Fisher, Florida State went 6-6 in the 2017 regular season. Fisher left to take the Texas A&M job before the Seminoles drubbed Southern Miss 42-13 in the Independence Bowl.
A springboard forward for the post-Fisher era? As former Florida State quarterback and college football media icon Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.”
