Schoffel: Is it time to put FSU's 2020 football season out of its misery?

In the grand scheme of things, the Florida State football program has maneuvered through the COVID aspect of this unprecedented and bizarre 2020 season about as well as could be expected. The Seminoles now have had two games postponed due to health concerns -- the same number as rivals Florida and Miami -- and as of Saturday, there was still a chance that both of those missed games could be rescheduled.

If you had told any FSU fans before the season that by late November the Seminoles will have played eight games and still have a chance to get to 11, they would have said, "Sign me up!" on the spot.

Back then, we didn't know if college football would even make it through a month, let alone an entire season. And sure enough, some teams had cancellations and postponements right off the bat.

Not Florida State.

Until last week's cluster-*$#! with Clemson, it had been smooth sailing for the Seminoles when it came to dealing with the coronavirus. They held practices and played home games with no problem. They took road trips to Miami and Notre Dame, Louisville and N.C. State with hardly a concern.

For two months, the Seminoles were essentially COVID-free.

Perhaps that's part of the reason these past two weeks have been so maddening for Florida State fans. After the first eight games were played essentially as scheduled, it started to feel like we had this thing licked. Like every game would take place as planned.

All it took was eight days in November to show us how wrong we were.

The Clemson game was postponed because the Tigers unknowingly traveled a player who tested positive for the coronavirus. Saturday's Virginia game was postponed because the Seminoles' already-depleted roster was hit by two positive cases this week and had several more players caught up in contact tracing.

The irony here is that part of the reason FSU didn't want to go through with the Clemson game was because any spread of the virus from the Tigers to the Seminoles could have derailed FSU's chances of playing the rest of its schedule. And yet here we are facing that exact scenario.

None of this should be totally surprising, however.