After firing Mike Norvell, here comes the hard part for Florida State: Finding a coach who wants the job

· Yahoo Sports

The last time Florida State went looking for a football coach, it was widely considered among the best 15 jobs in the sport.

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The list of big names associated with the job was long, encompassing everyone from Lane Kiffin to James Franklin. And when Florida State’s search locked in on Mike Norvell, who had just taken Memphis to the Cotton Bowl, it needed to beat out other prominent schools like Arkansas and Ole Miss who had significant interest in him. 

That’s how enduring the Florida State brand was, even after the messy exit of Jimbo Fisher to Texas A&M and the woebegone Willie Taggart era had left the program in tatters. It was still viewed as a place the right coach could come in and contend for national titles. 

But with that same coaching search taking place today, it’s difficult to see how Florida State is in position to land the hottest young coach in the country or beat out even the lower-level SEC schools. As college football has evolved in the seven years since hiring Norvell, Florida State enters the coaching market today dealing with a new reality it hasn’t experienced since Bobby Bowden brought the program to greatness. 

As the school will learn in the coming days and weeks, it’s just not considered an elite job anymore. 

To be sure, Florida State’s decision to end the Norvell era following Saturday’s awful 36-24 loss at home to Clemson will provide relief for a fan base that simply had enough. Even if you believe Norvell to be a quality coach who was the victim of unfortunate circumstances, his tenure was unrecoverable after losing 21 out of his last 26 games against power conference opponents. 

It should never get that bad in Tallahassee, and the next coach will undoubtedly benefit from the simple act of turning the page. 

But Florida State fans should also prepare for a dose of humility as speculation about their candidate pool gets underway. While the timing of this change could be fortuitous for the Seminoles — the lack of competition on the job market so far will create favorable conditions for a good hire — there are a number of factors that add up to a reality many Florida State fans may not be ready for.

The candidate pool this time will not look as attractive on the surface as it was during their last two searches. Among the reasons for that, according to industry sources who have planned on the FSU job coming open this year, is financial issues.

One of the reasons why Norvell’s tenure blew up so spectacularly is that Florida State, according to sources, fell into the middle of the pack of the ACC in terms of roster spending despite early success in the transfer portal.

“Norvell embraced the portal because that’s the only way to get players in and try to flip it right away and they got a lot of those players,” one person familiar with the situation told Yahoo Sports. “They had money. They might have had like $8 million in the first or second rev share years, which would have been top 15 or top 20 and they just didn’t keep pace with it. The last three years, they’ve been really behind.” 

Some will argue that Florida State’s boosters stopped giving money because they no longer believed in Norvell and his coaching staff, and there’s a good case to be made that changing coaches will juice up outside spending. 

But the financial reality at Florida State is ugly. Because the school had been so far behind in facilities during the Fisher and Taggart eras, Florida State needed to spend $400 million just to catch up. The debt service on those investments kicked in just when roster costs were exploding thanks to revenue sharing. 

Florida State coach Mike Norvell went 41-39 in seven years in Tallahassee. (James Black/Getty Images)Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Now, on top of that, it will cost tens of millions of dollars more to swap out coaching staffs. Though Norvell’s buyout number of $47 million will likely be lower than that because he has a duty to mitigate written into his contract — in other words, when Norvell gets another job, the money he’s paid will be subtracted from what FSU owes him — there’s still the matter of assistant coaches and staff members who have compensation guaranteed beyond this year. And, of course, there will likely be buyouts to pay to get the next coach out of his current contract. It’s such an expensive proposition that Florida State’s administration was desperate for Norvell to hold on at least another year so that the financials could stabilize. 

Since firing Mike Alford earlier this year, Florida State’s athletic department has essentially been run by Board of Trustees chairman Peter Collins. Between Collins and president Richard McCullough, there is a heavy hand in athletics from the university side but very little evidence they know what they’re doing. 

At a meeting of trustees this week, Collins acknowledged that the athletic director search hadn’t even started yet, largely because of a top-to-bottom review of the athletic department that is expected to lead to major structural changes. While that may yield positive results over the long haul, it’s unclear exactly what it means and who’s going to be in charge. Perhaps there’s a world where Florida State can speed run its AD search and involve that person in picking the next coach, but that’s an awful lot to do in the span of four or five weeks. 

While it won’t matter as much for current assistants, Group of Six coaches or retreads looking for one last shot, anyone with good options will have deep concerns about the administrative structure and what kind of athletic department they’re walking into. 

At many points in history, the Florida State brand was strong enough that even a small leap of faith felt like a safe bet. It’s harder to make that case now.

Everyone knows the Seminoles want out of the ACC and even sued the league over its restrictive grant of rights.

The good news is that a legal settlement in 2025 made it less financially penal to change conferences and led to some concessions Florida State had wanted like revenue distribution weighted to football and men’s basketball TV ratings. The bad news is, nobody else wants Florida State in their league for the foreseeable future. If somehow the ACC organically broke up, it would be North Carolina and Virginia — not Florida State — in the middle of a tug-of-war between the SEC and Big Ten. 

There’s simply no way to predict what Florida State’s future looks like five years down the road. It could be anything from trying independence to being forced to join the Big 12 because the ACC imploded to status quo to being included in a 40-team super league that breaks away from the rest of college football. That uncertainty makes it difficult to know what kind of job it will become. In some ways, FSU may not even look as attractive to some candidates as Maryland, which has very little historical success but at least has a lucrative spot in the Big Ten. 

None of this means Florida State is doomed to permanent irrelevance. In the NIL/transfer portal era, college football has seen plenty of new hires have success under similar or even more difficult circumstances. 

But the era of viewing Florida State as one of the sport’s blue-blood jobs that can attract the interest of successful, sitting power conference coaches is essentially over. In the Bowden era, Florida State fully leveraged its geography in the state’s panhandle, being easily accessible to the I-4 corridor talent hub as well as South Georgia. But now that neighborhood is ruled by the nearby SEC schools like Alabama, Georgia and Auburn, all of whom have more money to spend on players. 

Selling recruits on the iconic gold helmet with the spear logo isn’t enough anymore. 

These limitations don’t absolve Norvell from responsibility for how quickly the program slipped after 2023 when it finished the regular season 13-0. But it does mean this search will have a different tenor than the last one, when some big names were at least intrigued by the opportunity.

This time, Florida State’s administration will have a lot of explaining to do with candidates about its path to success in the current era. Whether the school reaches to the past and brings back Fisher (who has made it known he wants the job) or takes a flier on an up-and-coming assistant, this will not be a star-studded candidate pool like we’ve seen the last couple times the job has come open. 

The Seminoles were probably overdue to pull the plug on the failed Norvell era. But given the program’s current situation, that’s not even half the battle. 

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