Florida State’s 36-year bowl streak is on life support

With their most recent loss to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the Florida State Seminoles’ bowl streak is on life support with two games remaining.

For 36 straight seasons, the Florida State Seminoles have done enough on the gridiron to merit inclusion in a holiday season bowl. It helps to have a Mount Rushmore-level head coach in Bobby Bowden, as well as another excellent one in the form of Jimbo Fisher leading the way.

However in Willie Taggart’s first season in Tallahassee, Florida State could be on the outside looking in at a bowl for the first time since 1981. Maybe even more impressive, the Seminoles have finished above .500 every year since 1977. Bowden’s first year with the program was in 1976, where he went 5-6 leading the Seminoles.

With two regular season games left, Florida State finds itself at an unthinkable 4-6 on the year. In seasons past, Florida State was totally capable of doing enough to get to six wins in a season, even in the worst of years. Can Florida State do it in 2018?

Probably not, as the Seminoles’ next two opponents were ranked entering the most recent week of play in the Boston College Eagles and the in-state rival Florida Gators. Florida State will need to upset both rivals if they even want to sniff a bowl game.

If the Seminoles want to keep the winning seasons streak intact, they must beat Boston College, Florida and whomever they meet in an awful bowl game to improve to 7-6.

So if the Seminoles falter one more time in the next two weeks, who would then have the longest active bowl streak in college football? That would be another ACC team in the Virginia Tech Hokies, who are riding a 25-year bowl streak of them own.

That being said, the Hokies are only 4-5 on the year and need to win their next two games as well to achieve bowl eligibility. Though the Miami Hurricanes are struggling at 5-5, this might be the year that Virginia Tech falls to the arch rival Virginia Cavaliers in the Commonwealth Cup. The last time Virginia beat Virginia Tech, some guy named Matt Schaub was quarterbacking for the Hoos in Charlottesville.

So let’s just say both Florida State and Virginia Tech lose in the next two weeks. That’s totally in play, as the ACC has been largely horrendous this fall outside of the Clemson Tigers. Entering 2018, the longest active bowl streak belongs to the Oklahoma Sooners at 19. Oklahoma has made a bowl in every year of the Bob Stoops era (1999-2016) and the first two of the Lincoln Riley era in Norman (2017-present).

Honestly, it’s so weird to see Florida State and Virginia Tech struggle this mightily on the gridiron. Virginia Tech probably wishes it didn’t have its September game versus the lowly East Carolina Pirates canceled due to a hurricane. That was a guaranteed win. One of their four wins came against Florida State in the season opener on Labor Day Weekend. And we thought that game was going to mean something…

By this time next week, we could see two bowl streaks of at least a quarter of a century in length come to an end. Florida State and Virginia Tech belong in bowl games. Did Florida State make a bad hire in prying Taggart away from the Oregon Ducks? What on earth is going on in Blacksburg with Justin Fuente’s Virginia Tech program?

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Something has to give and that is probably those two ACC schools’ bowl streaks. It would take quite the partly to not see them both snapped before you’re done shoveling turkey and so many sides into your face in two weeks time.