Opinion: The state of Florida has never been so irrelevant in college football
Fireworks were going off in Doak Campbell Stadium, Florida State players were jumping from the field into the crowd and fans were doing the Tomahawk chop.
The Seminoles had just pulled out a dramatic 31-28 win over Miami, scoring 10 points in the final five minutes including a game-winning drive that started with a 59-yard pass and needed a fourth-and-14 conversion to set up the winning touchdown with 26 seconds left.
It had almost everything you’d want from a Miami-FSU game: Momentum-changing plays, a dramatic finish, even a confrontation at midfield between the two teams during a television timeout.
Just imagine if it actually mattered.
As fans spend the next few weeks debating which teams deserve to join Georgia in the College Football Playoff, the second-most intriguing storyline in the sport right now is the utter irrelevance of the state of Florida.
No area of the country produces more really good football players than the recruiting ground that Florida, Florida State and Miami share along with a handful of smaller programs that often punch above their weight because of the talent in their backyard.
And yet this season, Florida’s seven FBS programs are a combined 28-42 without a single one of them in the mix to play for anything significant this postseason.
In college football terms, this is as improbable as eating a bad meal in New Orleans or being unable to find a blackjack table in Las Vegas. You almost have to try to fail this dramatically.
Sure, in the context of what they’ve been through this season, Florida State deserves to celebrate after breaking Miami’s four-game winning streak in the series. The Seminoles have had a rough go of it since Jimbo Fisher’s final season in 2017, and finally — two coaches later — it looks like Mike Norvell is building some competence back into the operation.
But still, FSU is 4-6 and is likely headed to a fourth straight season with a losing record. Miami, a preseason top-20 team, is now 5-5 and headed toward a big decision on coach Manny Diaz’s future. The Florida Gators have sunk so low that they were celebrating in the locker room Saturday after an embarrassing performance against Samford that could hardly be called a “win,” even if it goes in the record books that way. Heck, even UCF is flailing around in mediocrity these days at 6-4 after a 27-point loss to SMU.
What in the name of Ponce de Leon is going on here?
Success tends to go in cycles, but historically it’s pretty common for at least two of the big programs in Florida to be good at the same time. Maybe one of them dips a little bit, but there’s always enough talent in the state to bounce back quickly.
What we’re seeing now, though, is a historic confluence of awfulness from Florida, Florida State and Miami. In fact, you’d have to go back to 1978 — well before any of them became national powers — to find a season where none of the three finished in the top 25.
To be perfectly clear, this was not expected. The Hurricanes came into the season ranked 16th, but they’ve been digging out of a hole ever since getting smacked by Alabama in the season opener and falling apart in the fourth quarter against Michigan State back on Sept. 18. In Gainesville, Dan Mullen seemed as secure as ever coming off three straight trips to New Year’s Six bowl games. Only the Seminoles seemed to be behind the curve, trying to rebuild their roster after the messy Fisher exit and the failed 21-game tenure of Willie Taggart.
Lo and behold, Florida State sits here three months later with perhaps the only fan base in the state that is somewhat pleased with the state of their program — and that’s only because expectations were nonexistent to begin with.
Every program has some flaws and obstacles to success, but there’s no explanation other than mismanagement for how all three of these programs have gotten so sideways.
Certainly, the landscape is competitive in a different way now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s when a rivalry like FSU-Miami or Florida-FSU dominated entire seasons. These days, more programs get on national TV. Recruiting is national, and every coaching staff in every corner of the country is competing to lure players out of Florida. Though they’ve made up some ground in recent years, all three of those schools fell way behind their peers for a period of time in the facility wars.
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But the trends in recruiting are pretty revealing. According to Rivals.com's ranking of the top 20 high school prospects in Florida, only three in last year’s signing class went to Florida and two went to Miami — the same number that went to Maryland. Alabama, by contrast, took seven.
It was pretty much the same story for the freshmen that enrolled in 2020 where Florida, Miami and Florida State combined to land nine of the top 20 while the rest went to a variety of schools including Georgia, Clemson and LSU.
If three top-shelf programs with great tradition, history and geography aren’t landing the majority of blue chip recruits in Florida, that’s a serious problem. And it’s why Florida fans have been so frustrated this season with Dan Mullen’s public dismissiveness over questions about whether he’s getting the job done in recruiting.
There are a lot of great programs all over the country to play college football. But the idea that the Hurricanes, Seminoles and Gators can’t convince the best kids from Miami or Tampa to come to their schools is so antithetical to the nature of the sport that it truly defies all logic and belief.
Until that changes, though, the most relevant state in the union to college football’s talent pool is going to be missing in action when it comes time to win championships.