Florida State Football: Seminoles’ season in peril after upset loss

Florida State football went from playoff hopeful to chaos in the matter of three weeks. Now winless, can the Seminoles salvage their broken season?

Florida State had so much potential and promise in the preseason, but now they sit at 0-2 after losing to Alabama and NC State. There are a number of factors that went into the loss today. Firstly, the loss of their quarterback Deondre Francois was a huge blow to the team. Secondly, not playing a game for 21 straight days because of the hurricane was a evident.

The Seminole defense does deserve some credit. The loss on Saturday was more a function of poor offense. It’s easy to criticize the defense in a loss, but NC State is a good team and was going to put up points. Analyst rarely acknowledge the correlation between the effectiveness of offense to the amount of points they give up on defense.

Florida State only managed 15 first downs compared to 21 for NC State. They were also only 4-of-14 on third down. When you are starting a true freshman quarterback like Florida State is, you have to play more ball control offense. That did not happen.

The Seminoles only had 26 rushing attempts for 104 yards against NC State. You would have thought that Jimbo Fisher would have made a bigger commitment to running the football to keep the true freshman comfortable. In Week 1 we thought that the struggles the running game showed versus Alabama were because they were playing Alabama. However, it’s clear that the Seminoles are going to need to run the football significantly better to win.

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The Wolf Pack is much improved offensively and defensively since Dave Doeren has been the coach, but this was a very winnable game for the Seminoles. Florida State has to go back to the drawing board and try to salvage the rest of the season.