When Florida State first started working on plans for a standalone football facility, Jimbo Fisher was the head football coach, John Thrasher was the university president and Stan Wilcox was the athletics director.

The football team has had two different head coaches since then, there have been two new athletics directors, and there's a new president.

Yet still no building.

So when Michael Alford begins his tenure at the helm of FSU's athletics department in early January, it's safe to say bringing that project to the finish line will be his most pressing early objective -- at least from a facilities standpoint.

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FSU Board of Trustees Chairman Peter Collins said building that facility is so imperative that Alford will have incentives in his employment contract tied to its completion.

"We're definitely going to get the football-only facility going, sooner rather than later," Collins said after Alford was introduced as FSU's new A.D. on Friday. "Sooner than a lot of people think. That's a big goal. That's going to be one of the components of his contract."

Over the last five years, a number of obstacles have stood in the project's way.

Fisher bolted for Texas A&M early in the planning process, and then fundraising took a hit when Willie Taggart's tenure got off to such a poor start. Then there was fierce internal debate about the location and features of the facility, and then FSU saw new leadership come in across the board.

David Coburn replaced Wilcox as A.D., Mike Norvell was hired to replace Taggart, and Alford took over as CEO of Seminole Boosters. That meant changes in vision, which led to a new design plan, and all of that was happening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, an idea that was first publicly discussed in early 2017 is still a concept on paper as 2022 rapidly approaches.

"Having just come through COVID and gone through what we've gone through, and the transition with the Boosters (becoming more integrated with the athletics department), I would say it's delayed things," Collins said. "It makes us all a little restless as Seminole fans. It makes us all a little restless. It's like, 'Can't we get off the starting block?'

"That's palpable if you're a Seminole. That sense of, 'Hey, we need to go,' is palpable. And I think the president locked into that very early in his interview process. You can't walk around Florida State and not say, 'Wow, there's a lot of potential here.' And we haven't been achieving that potential. So that's what we're motivated to do.

"I think we're going to surprise a lot of people with how quickly we're going to move on a lot of these items."

Some of the other items on Alford's to-do list will include moving forward with plans to renovate Doak Campbell Stadium, working on improvements to Dick Howser Stadium and raising funds to invest in other programs across campus.

But nothing has a higher profile right now than the football facility.

In an interview with Warchant last month, Alford said Seminole Boosters has raised about $54 million for the facility, which is expected to feature about 150,000 square feet of space and will house everything from a new weight room, locker room, meeting rooms and coaches' offices to recovery pools, nutrition stations and areas for virtual reality player enhancement.

"We're real excited where that's heading," Alford said, noting that FSU is one of very few Power 5 programs without a dedicated football facility.

The Seminoles currently share space in the cramped Moore Athletics Center with athletes from 20 varsity sports.

"It's critical," Norvell said, when asked Friday about the need for a standalone facility. "And Michael's awareness of that, from when he first got on the job, we've had ongoing discussions. ... It's something that we need. As you look across the country, that's something that with all of the resources and the things we have in place in taking care of our student-athletes now, we want to be progressive in that thought.

"Our guys, they're taken care of in every way. But as you look forward, we want to be on the cutting edge when it comes to the day-to-day interactions and the resources that we can provide in helping them in their development."

Collins, who worked with new FSU President Richard McCullough on the search for an athletics director, said one of the reasons they selected Alford was because he has been on campus since August 2020, and he has been intimately involved with all of these projects.

He will need no "on-the-job training," Collins said.

What he will need to do, though, is take FSU's long-discussed football facility from the drawing board to reality. It's one of several key agenda items on what Collins believes will be a bold new era for FSU Athletics.

"I don't have a lot of patience. The president doesn't have a lot of patience for getting to where we want to go," Collins said. "We have a passion for excellence. The president has a passion for excellence. I do. I think every 'Nole fan out there has a passion for excellence."

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