At the halfway point of the 2024 season, what were expected to be the goals of this Florida State football team are all out the window.
There will be no ACC Championship, nor appearance in the first edition of the 12-team College Football Playoff. With a 1-5 record through six games, even a bowl game appearance feels out of reach at this point.
While a pivot of expectations and goals wasn't what anyone imagined for this year's FSU team, there's still plenty on the line as the Seminoles begin the second half of their 2024 campaign next Friday at Duke.
Here's a look at three things FSU can salvage and learn from this disappointing 2024 season as it prepares to enter an offseason that all of a sudden becomes quite important for head coach Mike Norvell.
Find out if the 2025 starting QB is already on the roster
We've seen the perils of living in the transfer portal for a quarterback this season for the Seminoles.
FSU brought in DJ Uiagalelei to replace Jordan Travis with the belief he could be a bridge quarterback to the future with a solid offense around him he could be plugged into. While the offense didn't help Uiagalelei, he also didn't perform nearly well enough and things never seemed to click in five games under him.
Hindsight is obviously 20/20 but it sure looks now like FSU should have stood strong with the two scholarship quarterback options it had entering the offseason in redshirt freshman Brock Glenn and true freshman Luke Kromenhoek as well as preferred walk-on true freshman Trever Jackson.
The good news is that FSU hasn't totally wasted the opportunity to see what these players can bring entering a pretty pivotal offseason for the position group.
With Uiagalelei sidelined due to injury, Glenn made his first start of the season last week vs. Clemson. His entrance didn't magically fix the offense, but FSU's offense definitely looked different in his first start facing what was the best defense the Seminoles have gone against this season by a fairly wide margin.
He used his legs to extend plays, made some big-time throws and limited mistakes as well. It was undeniable that Glenn has taken some strides since he started the final two games of his true freshman season and he made a pretty compelling case that he could be the quarterback of the immediate future for the Seminoles.
If he really wants to do that, the back half of the season would be an ideal time for him to prove it. There are some tough games against the likes of Miami and Notre Dame but also some eminently winnable games against the likes of Duke, North Carolina, Charleston Southern and Florida, three of which are home games. Playing at a consistent level and maybe even building off the Clemson game would be a promising sign for Glenn's future.
FSU will also have the opportunity to use Kromenhoek in as many as four of FSU's final six regular-season games this season while maintaining his redshirt. Norvell said FSU had a plan to potentially use the true freshman vs. Clemson, but that the game sequence to do so didn't present itself. That's probably for the best as there are a few more games in the back half of the schedule where you can see what Kromenhoek has without throwing him into the deep end like FSU was forced to with Glenn in 2023.
These last six games are a prime opportunity to see if FSU can enter the offseason with confidence in either Glenn, Kromenhoek or even potentially both as the team's starting quarterback for its 2025 season opener vs. Alabama.
If not, FSU may be forced to again roll the dice of heading to the portal — probably at the cost of losing at least one of those two homegrown quarterbacks to the portal — to try and find its 2025 starter from elsewhere.
It has worked for other schools and certainly could for FSU. But as this year has proven it's a risky proposition.
Get the offensive groove back
It's truly hard to comprehend what has become of Norvell's FSU offense the last nine games dating back to the end of the 2023 season.
In Norvell's first 45 games at FSU from the start of the 2020 season through last November's 58-13 win over North Alabama, the Seminoles finished with less than 300 yards of offense in just three games.
Since then, FSU has failed to reach the threshold of 300 yards of offense in each of its last nine games dating back to the Florida game last November in Gainesville.
Before this current stretch, FSU had seen just one streak of multiple games in a row below 300 yards of offense since 2016, a two-game streak in 2021.
What was at least a moderately successful offense even early in Norvell's tenure when he had a culture to fix and less talent on paper has devolved in a worrisome way.
There's no one reason to point to as an explainer for these offensive problems. Certainly, the Seminoles have struggled in the post-Jordan Travis era. The last game they surpassed 300 yards was his last career start for the Seminoles.
Norvell's playcalling also hasn't looked quite the same this season — while struggling to find FSU's offensive identity — as it did in his first four seasons.
The biggest thing to me, though, is execution. Running the ball is a stunning struggle. FSU is averaging 58.0 rushing yards per game — dead last among Power Four teams — after averaging at least 150 rushing yards per game each of Norvell's first four seasons.
Receivers and tight ends are dropping far too many passes that Norvell schemes open. Pro Football Focus has FSU at 14 drops through six games this season, a number of which have seemed to be in some of the team's biggest spots.
Things like that have put FSU's offense consistently behind the chains, leading to the team's 28.92% third-down conversion percentage (126th in FBS), which has made sustaining drives and racking up yards a serious challenge.
The changes FSU has started to make on offense with younger players getting opportunities could lead to a boost. While the back half of the schedule has some real challenges, it also has a few teams like UNC and UF with defenses that have been exposed at times this season.
Finding something for the offense to build around, especially with so many players who have plenty of eligibility left seeing more extensive playing time, before the season comes to an end feels important for the program.
If things don't look much better at all down the back stretch of the 2024 season, the Seminoles enter this upcoming offseason with some real questions about how to rediscover what has gone missing from Norvell's once-great offense.
Find which young players can be leaders to build around
We've talked a lot this season about how a perceived lack of leadership has loomed large on FSU's struggles through six games this season.
Coaches say that the best teams — like the 13-1 2023 FSU team — are player-led. It certainly doesn't seem that's the case with this year's FSU squad, which had the unenviable task of replacing simultaneously so much talent as well as so much player leadership.
An important thing for the immediate future of the FSU football program is definitely finding those talented players to build around. We've seen a youth movement in terms of playing time ramp up over the last few weeks and it's likely to only continue growing over the back half of the season.
Sophomores and freshmen, of the true and redshirt variety, have started taking on more prominent roles and finding success early in their time in games.
But even more important may be finding that next batch of leaders and making sure that they are the players you keep at all costs and don't lose to the transfer portal this offseason. Because that's the easiest way to make sure the Seminoles don't find themselves in this player leadership void again.
More than the first two sections here, this isn't something that will be clear and obvious to those outside the program. These discussions are going to be more secretive, amongst staff members and probably harder to discern than pure talent-based conversations about players.
And yet finding those players across the roster feels just about as important as rebuilding the talent of the team which took an unexpected and sudden downturn this season.
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