Florida State Football: Noles’ Slow start no reason to panic about Willie Taggart era

Florida State football has lost two of its first three games under new head coach Willie Taggart. The program will be fine if they are willing to give Taggart time.

Things look dicey at Florida State after a 1-2 start through the first quarter of the first season under new head coach Willie Taggart. The Seminoles got their only win in a 36-26 game against FCS Samford where they were on upset alert throughout the day. Both losses have come in ACC play, putting the Seminoles in a hole in the conference race that will be hard to overcome.

The loss at Syracuse was especially tough, as the Seminoles traveled to New York as three-point favorites in Week 3. Instead, they departed vanquished in a 30-7 defeat where they gave up 450 yards to the Orange and managed just 240 yards themselves.

Fans may wonder what the athletic department got them into by hiring Taggart. After all, in their losses to Virginia Tech and Syracuse, Florida State managed only 10 total points and an average of fewer than 285 yards per outing. The return of Deondre Francois at quarterback hasn’t been able to masquerade the broader issues with depth across the entire offensive two-deep.

The primary concerns is the offensive line. They are doing little to either give Francois enough time to find open receivers or to open holes for Cam Akers and the other running backs. As the team struggles to create a new identity under Taggart and new offensive coordinator Walt Bell, there are bound to be growing pains.

Hiring Willie Taggart is a long-term plan for success. It isn’t a short-term bandage, nor is it likely to be an entirely comfortable process. And, despite the unrealistic expectations of a fan base that came into the season with expectations of getting back to ACC contention, hiring Taggart was also an acknowledgment that the Seminoles were in desperate need of a rebuild to change the culture left behind by Jimbo Fisher’s departure.

This is basically what you get when you hire Taggart

First of all, let’s acknowledge that rebuild specialists don’t start their careers well at a school. That is the pain that comes with a rebuild. His one 7-5 season at Oregon was an aberration, as much a product of the defensive turnaround engineered by coordinator Jim Leavitt as anything else. In Taggart’s first two stops as a head coach, his Western Kentucky and South Florida squads went 2-10 in his first season at both schools.

Both teams contended for conference titles by the time Taggart was moving up the ladder. Western Kentucky gradually improved from two wins to a pair of 7-5 seasons. The Hilltoppers went 7-1 in Sun Belt play and finished behind only Arkansas State in his second year at the helm.

South Florida went from 2-10 to 4-8 to 8-5 to 10-2 under Taggart’s management in his four seasons in Tampa. Taggart narrowly missed out on a shot at the American Athletic Conference title in his final year with the Bulls due to a head-to-head loss against Temple.

The 2018 season in Tallahassee probably won’t crater out quite as far as Taggart’s first seasons with Western Kentucky and South Florida. Expectations have turned south since the preseason, and Florida State will be scrambling to reach bowl eligibility over the course of the regular season, and they very well might fail to get to six wins this year given the composition of the last three-quarters of their schedule.

Even if they miss out on a bowl game this year, though, Florida State would be foolish to give up on Taggart after only one season. After Jimbo Fisher elected to leave the school where he secured a national championship at the tail end of the BCS era, firing Taggart would begin to make the Seminoles look like a toxic asset to free-agent coaches as well as those looking to move from current head-coaching gigs or coordinator positions.

It was always silly to think that Florida State is anything other than a rebuilding project. The Seminoles will be just fine — if Taggart’s plan is given enough time to come to fruition. If Florida State opts for a knee-jerk reaction to a disappointing first season, though, they will only doom themselves to an even harder time with the next coaching search.