We all know the Florida State offensive line was bad in 2018. Or horrid. Embarrassing. Woefully inept. Pick a word or a phrase. They all fit.
But I'm not sure any of us fully appreciate just what kind of horror show we watched for three months. So I did some digging on Pro Football Focus, which somehow grades out each college football player on every snap they play. For the entire season. ( I can't even fathom how they have enough manpower to do such a thing, but good on ya, PFF!)
Here's what I found out: Florida State had the worst Power 5 offensive line in the country. And it wasn't particularly close. And when we wonder about Willie Taggart's inept offense, if we wonder how the bowl streak ended, how in the world FSU could look this bad, it all goes back to that group up front.
These numbers are incredible. So you might want to sit down if you're not already. Then again, how many people actually read while standing up? Unless you're a tourist looking at a map of Disney or something, you're likely already on your behind -- which, as it turns out, was the traditional pose of the 2018 FSU offensive line.
Anyway, here you go:
Seven Florida State offensive linemen played at least 20 percent of the snaps this season. All told, there were 837 players in college football who met that criteria for their respective teams. Here are the national ranks of those seven FSU players: 837, 832, 791, 709, 537, 536, 449.
If Abdul Bello had played a few more snaps, he would've qualified as well -- and been ranked No. 836.
That's how bad it was for Florida State in 2018. The Seminoles had nobody that was even average this season. They had three pretty sub-par linemen, according to PFF, and four awful ones.
And it resulted in the worst offensive line in the country. Worse than Kansas. Worse than Rutgers. Worse than every single Power 5 offense in the United States.
At least according to our friends at Pro Football Focus.
To give this some context, I took the average grades of the offensive linemen (who played at least 20 percent of their team's snaps) on the 12 Power 5 teams who ranked 100th or worse in the country in total offense: Iowa State (No. 101), Kentucky (102), FSU (104), Louisville (110), Northwestern (111), Kansas (112), California (113), Kansas State (114), Michigan State (116), Arkansas (118), Tennessee (122) and Rutgers (128).
I didn't want to see how the Seminoles' front line measured up against the best of the best. I wanted to see how they stacked up with the worst of the worst.
Here's what I found:
