Florida State wasted a year dodging Mike Norvell's buyout, and now it's hiring in a hurry

Florida State should hire its athletic director first and its football coach second, even if that costs it a few signatures in December. I know how that sounds the morning after a 3-5 start finally cost Mike Norvell his job. But the school just spent a year showing what happens when a football decision gets made with a calculator in one hand, and I'd hate to watch it do the same thing again in fast forward.

Start with how we got here. ESPN reported that Florida State hoped to avoid paying Norvell's $50.3 million buyout, so it gave him another season with more roster resources. I've signed off on worse bargains, mostly involving used cars. What the school got for its patience was a 36-24 home loss to Clemson on Saturday, a tie for last in the ACC and a team that, per ESPN, hasn't won a regular-season road game since it beat Florida on Nov. 25, 2023. Since that unbeaten 2023 season the Seminoles are 10-23. That record belongs to the people who signed the checks as much as the man on the sideline, because they watched the slide and decided the bill was scarier.

I want to be fair to Norvell here. He's the coach who went 13-0 and won the ACC in 2023, and then the committee left his team out of the four-team playoff with Jordan Travis hurt. He finishes 41-39 in seven seasons. Interim athletic director Bruce Warwick said Norvell told the players himself and left the room to a standing ovation. That tells you something about the man, and none of what follows is about him.

What worries me is the next three weeks. Florida State fired athletic director Michael Alford in September. President Richard McCullough says a search firm will run the AD search and the coaching search at the same time, and that "time is of the essence" with signing day next month. I've been around long enough to know what "at the same time" turns into. Whoever gets to a coach first picks him, and the new AD walks in to find a hire he didn't make and a contract he didn't write.

The other side has a real argument, and I'll give it its full weight. Signing day is next month. Recruits want to know who's coaching them. Rick Stockstill, who ran Middle Tennessee for 18 seasons and has been the program's director of scouting, can hold a locker room together through four games starting at Boston College, but an interim staff can't sell a kid on the next four years. Wait too long and somebody else's coach is sitting on that kid's couch.

I'd take that hit anyway. One recruiting class is recoverable. The wrong coach on a long contract, signed in a hurry, is not, and Florida State is the proof, since by ESPN's account this whole season happened because the last contract was too expensive to walk away from. The person who negotiates the next deal, including what it costs to get out of it, should be the person who'll be across the desk from that coach in year four. That's an athletic director's job. A search firm doesn't have to live with the result.

McCullough called Saturday night "a defining moment" for him and said "I just did not see that trajectory." Fair enough. I'd just like the next decision to look less like the last one. Hire the AD by Thanksgiving, let that person pick the coach, and if a couple of recruits sign somewhere else in December, file that under the cost of the year Florida State spent protecting a buyout.

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