Florida State Football: Willie Taggart needs to deliver on the hype
The biggest issue with Florida State football isn’t the offense or the defense. It’s in the fan expectations which overshot the Noles’ on-field performance.
Willie Taggart is great at marketing. At the beginning of the 2018 season, Taggart sold the team and his abilities so thoroughly that fans and alumni truly thought that the ‘Noles were an unstoppable force. This pre-season giddiness made the reality of the first game that much more brutal.
If you believe in Willie Taggart, kids, clap your hands.
*crickets*
The woes of the Seminoles aren’t exclusively on Taggart’s shoulders. The ‘Noles have a litany of issues that need to be addressed before the 2019 season rolls around. The O-line is nothing short of chaotic—the 2018 season had NINE different offensive line combinations. This led to players being forced into positions that they were unfamiliar with at best or had never played at worst.
The offensive line couldn’t block the run or the pass. Not that this issue is new for the Seminoles. Outside of the 2013 national title season, the Seminoles have struggled to recruit and maintain offensive talent for a decade.
Taggart does excel at recruiting, but he has his work cut out for him to get the offense up to ACC standards before September. The biggest frustration is that the talent is there. On paper, The Seminoles should have done much, much better than the final stats showed. Nearly four decades of excellence (2017 season notwithstanding) were destroyed in one terrible season. To put it into perspective for folks that are unfamiliar with Florida State’s history—the last time that the Seminoles lost seven games was in 1975. 1975, y’all.
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So yes, Taggart’s preseason marketing was brilliant, but he just couldn’t seem to find his way. He was in over his head, and the Seminoles went from being a football powerhouse to the laughingstock of the ACC. Let’s face it. The 2018 Seminoles were the Google Glass of football—a lot of noise with a marked inability to live up to the hype. Sure, Seminole fans have insane expectations—but history is on our side. We are used to winning. And that is the biggest thing that needs to be fixed before September—the fans need to believe again.