It was the question I'd been wondering since his team beat North Carolina, 3-2, on Sunday afternoon to capture the 2020 ACC Championship and finish with a perfect 11-0-0 record.
Did Florida State soccer coach Mark Krikorian think the Seminoles should declare themselves national champions?
"If Stanford and UCLA and USC and Penn State, if they ain't playing (it doesn't count)," Krikorian said. "I know what it feels like, how much hard work and energy and effort went into winning legitimate national championships. I'm not declaring myself a national champion until we knock those guys off."
Which, as I told him, is one of the many things that separates guys like him from guys like me.
Because you best believe, if my team went undefeated and untied during a season, and outscored its opponents 34-6 with eight shutouts, against an ACC schedule that still featured some of the very best teams in the country, while the other powerhouse programs didn't play at all, didn't go through COVID-19 testing three times a week, didn't sacrifice so much just to participate in a shortened season, I would have put up a banner on Sunday night.
I would've passed out "2020 National Champs" hats to my players as soon as that whistle sounded.
But unlike myself, Krikorian is a true competitor. It's one of the things that makes him so successful. And he's not looking to claim something that wasn't rightfully earned.
So I suggested he could at least get a banner that says something like: "No. 1 final ranking, undefeated 2020 season," and put that up in the complex somewhere to go along with that seventh ACC championship trophy.
"My wife said that, too: 'Well, right now, you have the No. 1 team in the country,'" Krikorian said with a laugh. "No, no, no. We're not doing that here. Not in my office. ... I know how hard I worked in 2014, 2018, 1994, 1995 to win national championships. We're not declaring ourselves anything. If they're going to hand us a trophy, we're going to earn it."
Fair enough, Coach!
Krikorian will get his chance to earn a real national championship trophy in May when the NCAA Tournament is scheduled to start. He has no idea right now what his spring schedule will look like, however.
He would like to play seven more games in the spring to prepare for that event, but if the returning conferences decide to play conference-only matches, he doesn't know who his team will play.
The ACC could schedule another conference-only schedule presumably, but Krikoran wasn't sure what the point of that would be. His team has already won the conference and gets the automatic qualifying bid to the NCAA Tournament in May.
But he does somehow, some way need to find some quality competition for his team before heading in six months to the national tournament. Where, he hopes, his players -- all of whom he expects back for the new "season" in 2021 -- can get handed a trophy they actually earned.
Like the one they were handed on Sunday after that 3-2 win over North Carolina.
It capped off a remarkable 11-game stretch in which the Seminoles never trailed, not for a single second, on their way to an unblemished record.
Krikorian said he knew coming into 2020 that it might be the most talented team he had ever coached at FSU, but he had no idea it would steamroll through the schedule the way it did. Especially since there was that not-so-minor obstacle of a global pandemic that had to be overcome.
Krikorian said he was incredibly proud of how his team -- and all of the teams in the ACC for that matter -- handled the testing and the protocols so that a season could actually be played.
As far as what happened on the field, well, he's not sure he's ever had a team play better.
"A lot of times (coaches) are sandbagging,' Krikorian said. "We didn't take that approach. I said from Day 1 that this had the potential to be the most talented and best team that we've ever had here. If there was an NCAA Tournament, a national championship, we'd know whether or not we have what it takes to win in the end.
"But certainly this group passed every test that came their way this fall. It wasn't easy. There was nothing easy about this season. It was complicated in so many different ways. But that's the same for every team. What I said from Day 1 is it's really a mature team, the most mature team I've ever had at Florida State. They were in it together. They did all of the little things to help give us a chance to play all of our games and then compete at the highest level we could."
The No. 1 Florida State Seminoles already added one trophy to the case.
In six months, we'll get to see if they can add one more.
Contact senior writer Corey Clark at corey@warchant.com and follow @Corey_Clark on Twitter.
----------------------------------------------------
Talk about this story with other Florida State football fans in the Tribal Council
