Florida State’s Mike Norvell struggles with missing the College Football Playoff

The best thing for Mike Norvell and the Florida State Seminoles is that this year starts. No one outside of Tallahassee wants to hear complaints about being robbed of a spot in the College Football Playoff.

It happened. It sucked. And Georgia dragged them by their skulls into the Orange Bowl for everyone to see.

ESPN’s David Hale asked Norvell about SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey’s comments about Georgia being a top-four team but missing the playoffs last year. Everyone knew Georgia was a top-four team, but they lost the one game they couldn’t afford to lose: Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.

Just when I thought Norvell was going to admit defeat and move on, he started ranting again. “I don’t disagree that Georgia was one of the four best teams in terms of talent and skill, but they also deserved to lose,” he said. “That was part of what happened on the field.”

Florida State controlled what it could control until everyone else pulled out of the bowl. “If you look at our team and what it was, we controlled the things we could control,” Norvell continued. “We had an injury, unfortunately, but we had a team that responded to that.”

It left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth about Florida State’s role in college football.

When asked about Mike Norvell’s comments that UGA was a top 4 team that didn’t make the playoffs, but the SEC didn’t complain about it…

Norvell: “I don’t disagree that Georgia was one of the top four teams in terms of talent and skill, but they also deserved their loss. That was…

— 💫🅰️♈️🆔 (@ADavidHaleJoint) July 22, 2024

The way Florida State handled the selection committee oversight and desire to break away from the ACC is abysmal damage control. They failed miserably.

It took an unprecedented series of events to make this happen. But why isn’t Florida State getting it?

Before I get into it, let me be clear: I’m happy that we now have a 12-team playoff format with only five automatic qualifiers. The winners of the top five conferences should be in this expanded postseason format.

Let’s take a look back at the six teams that were still in the playoff mix as of Selection Sunday. Big Ten champion Michigan and Pac-12 champion Washington were confident, as they were both 13-0 and Power Five conference champions.

Texas was a Power Five champion with one loss from the Big 12. The Longhorns had a blowout win over Alabama in non-conference play. Their only loss was to Oklahoma in Red River.

Alabama jumped over Florida State and Georgia into fourth place as they had the best winning streak of anyone in the country, with their only loss coming to Big 12 champion Texas earlier in the season.

Add in the fact that starting quarterback Jordan Travis went down against North Alabama during cupcake week and it changed everything. His injury changed the perception of Florida State football; with Tate Rodemaker and then Brock Glenn at quarterback, it was undeniably a different team.

In my opinion, the four best teams last season, in any order, were Michigan, Texas, Georgia and Florida State.

As a UGA alumnus, I would have liked to have been in the play-offs as well, but I understand why that didn’t happen.