AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. -- It was a simple gesture by a couple of players, but it meant the world to Florida State football coach Willie Taggart.
After grades were posted for the spring semester and 29 of the Seminoles' football players notched their "personal best" grade-point averages, FSU's coaching staff handed out certificates of achievement during a team meeting.
Not prizes. Not major awards. Just certificates.
"A couple guys weren't there, and the next day, they were knocking on my door wanting their certificate," Taggart said with a smile. "I thought that was pretty cool."
While the academic successes and failures of a college football team are not recognized as often as on-the-field achievements, Taggart believes there is a direct correlation between the two.
During his previous head coaching stints at Western Kentucky and USF, Taggart said, improvement in the classroom often preceded improvement on the field. Players started feeling better about themselves, managing their time more effectively and had less stress to deal with.
"Once that got corrected, everything else started to roll for us -- once we decreased that drag on our lives," Taggart said.
Florida State's football program certainly has room for improvement.
When the NCAA released its most recent Academic Progress Rate statistics last week -- through the 2017-18 academic year -- the Seminoles had the lowest multi-year score (936 out of 100) of any Football Bowl Subdivision program.
The vast majority of those struggles occurred under the previous coaching staff, and they were exacerbated by the large number of players who transferred toward the end of Jimbo Fisher's tenure. In general, schools see their scores decline when players become ineligible, when they fail to make satisfactory progress toward a degree and when they leave school with eligibility remaining. The hit is doubly painful if a player leaves early and ineligible at the time.
