Staying on course: How FSU coaches plan to lead team through rough start
Mike Norvell has never experienced anything quite like this.
He has lost football games before, of course, as a player and a coach. But he has never led -- or even been a part of -- a coaching staff that took over a program and immediately suffered back-to-back embarrassing losses to start a season.
In fact, since becoming a full-time college football coach in 2007, Norvell has only been part of one losing regular season -- he was the wide receivers coach at Tulsa in 2009 when the Golden Hurricane went 5-7.
Every other regular season has been .500 or better, and the vast majority have been much better.
So as the Florida State Seminoles try to regroup from their shellacking at Miami and prepare for this Saturday's game against visiting Jacksonville State (4 p.m., RSN), Norvell is entering somewhat uncharted territory. He not only has to continue working with his players to clean up their mistakes, but he also must help them cope with a high level of frustration and disappointment.
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While Norvell has never guided a program through struggles like this, several of his assistant coaches do have experience with somewhat similar situations. They also have seen those programs come through the other side, going from brutal defeats to inspiring victories.
The most recent example is running backs coach David Johnson, who was a part of a Tennesee staff that led its players through such a transformation just last season.
When Johnson and the rest of Jeremy Pruitt's staff arrived in Knoxville in 2018, the Volunteers were coming off a 4-8 season. And that first campaign under Pruitt didn't go much better; their first game was a 40-14 loss to West Virginia, and they would finish that season at 5-7.
Six of those seven losses were blowouts by at least 25 points
But after a rough start again in 2019, featuring an ugly home loss to Georgia State to start the season and several more blowouts, the Volunteers turned things around in the middle of the year. They hung tight with a then-No. 1 Alabama team on the road for most of three quarters, then they reeled off six straight victories to finish the season.
Johnson, who previously worked for Norvell at Memphis and left Tennessee to join Norvell's staff in Tallahassee this past January, said one of the keys to that turnaround was never making major changes to practice or preparation, regardless of how poorly things went on Saturdays.
"I think the biggest thing is to stay on course and understand that there's a process," Johnson told Warchant.com this week. "Regardless of wins or losses, you have to understand the standard. You have to understand the process. ... And you have to coach from a positive standpoint. Trying to find out what they do well and put them in position to do the things that they can do at full-speed.
"But what you don't want to do is you don't want to lower the standard. You don't want to panic. You don't want to coach from frustration, because kids obviously don't make mistakes on purpose."
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