Getty Image / James Gilbert
After their 28-13 loss to Boston College on Monday night, the Florida State Seminoles are officially off to a nightmare start. They followed up their stunning Week 0 loss to Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland with an absolute dud at home as two-touchdown favorites.
If you didn’t watch the game, you might be wondering how exactly did Boston College beat Florida State so convincingly. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Florida State simply refused to run the ball.
On paper, the Seminoles should be much better in the trenches than Boston College. According to the 247 Team Talent Rankings, Florida State is 13th and Boston College is 59th. That’s a pretty considerable gap, and it means that Florida State should be able to push the Eagles around.
But, they barely even tried to, and when they did try, they were incredibly unsuccessful. Florida State averaged just 1.3 yards per carry on Monday night. Sack yardage counts in rushing yard statistics in college football, so quarterback DJ Uiagalelei’s 8 carries for -5 yards factors into that.
But, let’s look at the stats for the team’s top three, running backs in Roydell Williams Kam Davis, and Lawrence Toafili. They had 7 carries for 26 yards. That’s not a great yards per carry by any means. But, how in the world do you only hand the ball off in a college football game to your top three backs seven times? DJ Uiagalelei is a streaky quarterback and has definitely been cold to start the year, but having him drop back to pass on 75% of snaps is not in any way a winning formula.
Frankly, Florida State Head Coach Mike Norvell should know better than abandoning the run like that. Sadly, after their 13-0 start to last season and getting left out of the College Football Playoff anyway, it seems like the entire program has forgotten how to play big-time college football.