Mike Norvell’s Florida State football debut was truly historically awful: 3 takeaways

Mike Norvell’s Florida State football debut was an embarrassing failure.

Florida State football looked especially atrocious in Mike Norvell’s debut as its head coach.

After leading the Memphis Tigers to the Cotton Bowl Classic a season ago, Norvell took the Florida State Seminoles job following the unmitigated disaster that was the brief two-year run of Willie Taggart in Tallahassee. If you truly love Seminoles football, you have to be embarrassed by what went down on Saturday afternoon and evening at Doak Campbell, losing to Georgia Tech, 16-13.

Here are three takeaways from Florida State’s awful loss to Georgia Tech.

1. A Georgia Tech quarterback named Jeff Sims outplayed seasoned veteran James Blackman.

The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets are a program that was run into the ground by Paul Johnson’s triple-option. They were crushed in recruiting because of it and Geoff Collins is faced with a tall task of making something respectable out of something so hopelessly antiquated. Yet, in his second year on The Flats, his quarterback Jeff Sims outplayed Florida State’s, James Blackman.

Sims completed 23-of-34 passes for 277 yards, a touchdown and two picks, as well as run it 13 times for 64 yards. Blackman, who has played the last few years at Florida State, completed 23-of-43 passes for 198 yards, one touchdown and an interception. He ran the ball six times for negative nine yards. How do you get beat through the air by a Georgia Tech quarterback?

2. You know how kept running the football but was terrible at it? Florida State.

When something doesn’t work, you have to keep doing it, especially if you have no idea what you’re doing. This isn’t the AAC anymore, this is the ACC! Though Georgia Tech has its warts, they have played solid defense for the last several years. When you go up against the triple-option for a decade-plus, run defense will be your forte. Well, Florida State ran the ball a ton to no avail.

The Seminoles ran the 35 times for 90 yards and no touchdowns. They averaged 2.6 yards per carry and nobody had more than 39 yards on the ground. Though they through the ball 10 times more on the game, the Seminoles’ inability to do anything rushing the football was their undoing in this disastrous Week 1 loss to the Ramblin’ Wreck of Georgia Tech.

3. How do you lose at home to the worst team in the ACC by a country mile at home in Week 1?

So how bad have things gotten in Tallahassee? Well, this is the first time since 1976 that the Seminoles have lost four straight season-openers. 1976 was the iconic Bobby Bowden’s first year leading the program after leaving the West Virginia Mountaineers. This was Georgia Tech’s first win at Florida State since Oct. 10, 2009. That was Johnson’s second year at Georgia Tech.

To lose at home to Georgia Tech would be like an SEC team losing at home to either the Arkansas Razorbacks or the Vanderbilt Commodores or a Big 12 teams losing at home to the Kansas Jayhawks. No matter how you slice it, it still stinks. Florida State should be 1-0 and feeling great about itself. However, tonight was an unfortunate reminder of how rotten things have gotten.

While Georgia Tech can build from this, Norvell and his program have to be beyond embarrassed.

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