In retrospect, it may be a good thing Florida State’s 2024 season went so disastrously off-the-rails.
I know that’s a wild thing to say, considering what all of us who follow (and/or cover) this program had to live through last fall.
But because things went so badly and FSU won just two games, there could be no half-measures. It was going to have essentially be a to-the-studs rebuild of the program.
At least in part due to this, Mike Norvell did what almost no football coaches do. He gave up playcalling, taking a step back to focus on the big picture and bring in Gus Malzahn as offensive coordinator in a Tulsa reunion nearly 20 years in the making.
We’ve seen at times that Norvell can be quite a good offensive playcaller. But that side of his coaching acumen undeniably fell off as the 2024 season droned on. As the offense sputtered, the head coach certainly didn’t help matters with his decision-making.
Malzahn, meanwhile, had spent the last 13 years as a head coach at Arkansas State (2012), Auburn (2013-20) and UCF (2021-24). Immediately upon taking the FSU OC job, Malzahn explained his reasoning as having grown weary of all the off-field duties that come with how college football has evolved and wanting to be able to focus on what he really loves, the game of football, again.
It’s taken just a few weeks to see how mutually beneficial this move has been for both sides of the equation.
Yes, Saturday’s game was against a weak FCS opponent in East Texas A&M. But the Seminoles have played an FCS opponent yearly for some time, and this was the most impressive domination of one of those games that I can recall.
FSU surpassed 700 yards of offense for the first time since 2000. It scored touchdowns on its first 10 possessions, and probably would have set a single-game program scoring record were it not for a red-zone fumble by its fourth-string, walk-on quarterback.
Starters were pulled starting in the middle of the second quarter. And still, the Seminoles kept pouring it on, wave after wave.
Malzahn, once again, was in his bag. The move up north from Orlando seems to have been incredibly beneficial for him as well.
He wasn’t getting fired last offseason at UCF if he had stuck around. But coming off a 4-8 2024 season, his seat may have been a bit warm.
Now, he seems to have found the Fountain of Youth in Tallahassee, throwing it back to his days as a trailblazing Arkansas high-school coach in the 1990s.
After FSU scored 19 offensive touchdowns and 185 total points in 12 games last season, the rejuvenated Seminoles have already scored 15 touchdowns and 108 points in two games this year.
After two games, FSU is tied for fifth nationally in points per game (54), seventh in yards per play (8.29) and second in yards per pass attempt (15.3).
One of those games was against an FCS opponent, sure, but the other was against Alabama, so it’s safe to say that equates to an above-average strength of schedule this early in the season.
Malzahn, never the most talkative of coaches in media settings, hasn’t yet been asked in his two Sunday postgame press conferences about how he’s felt in his return to being a football-focused coordinator.
If someone did ask him, he probably wouldn’t give the best answer because, after all, he wants to be focused on football, not himself.
But what Malzahn did say Sunday after the ETAMU beatdown could send a shiver down the spines of opposing teams left on the Seminoles’ 2025 schedule.
“This offense, we’re still a work in progress. They really didn’t start working together healthy until about three weeks ago, so it’s really good to see …,” Malzahn said. “I’m real pleased with the big picture. We do have some playmakers, I think everybody can see that. Just getting the details down, fine-tuning things to be a very effective offense no matter who we play.”
