NCAAF teams
Jared Shanker, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

Florida State on verge of back-to-back undefeated regular seasons

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher said he will feel “nothing” if the No. 3 Seminoles wrap a bow on consecutive undefeated regular seasons Saturday.

“We’ll get ready for Georgia Tech,” he said.

Publicly, Fisher has avoided smelling the roses he’s planted. The immediate goal after winning the national championship last January was to win another. He’s not paraded around the Seminoles’ 27-game winning streak and said luck has as much to do with the streak as any (a sentiment many analysts share regarding this recent Florida State run). During this holiday season of reflection, don’t expect the word “undefeated” at the Fisher table.

“We don’t ever say undefeated. National championships are the goal here,” Fisher said.

Goal or not, Fisher is on the verge of consecutive unblemished regular seasons. It’s dangerous territory comparing current coaches to lionized predecessors. There’s the risk of being labeled an iconoclast for uttering any perceived blasphemous statements toward Bobby Bowden.

That’s not the basis this post is built on -- there's no Venn diagram to weigh the accomplishments of Fisher and Bowden, who turned what was once the nation’s third-largest women’s college into a football power.

So save the pitchforks for the selection committee.

However, with a victory Saturday over Florida, Fisher and the Seminoles would finish the regular season undefeated in consecutive years, and that has never happened at Florida State.

It is an apples-to-oranges comparison with Bowden, who had only one undefeated season but regularly played Florida and Miami -- and Nebraska and Notre Dame and Ohio State and Pitt -- most at their peak. Bowden was playing an SEC-style schedule before it was the fashionable thing to do, and it’s hard to envision Fisher's Seminoles avoiding the landmines that were in front of Bowden annually during the 1980s and ’90s.

That shouldn’t take away from what Fisher has done in his short time as head coach in Tallahassee. Outside of the Florida State constituency, Fisher has been fairly criticized for several significant off-field issues, the allegations of sexual assault against Jameis Winston the most polarizing. During the last two seasons on the field, though, Fisher has been bulletproof and in the process has established himself as one of college football’s top coaches.

“Coach Jimbo, that’s what he tells us: We have a chance to do what people -- Deion [Sanders], [Terrell] Buckley, Coach [Lawrence] Dawsey and all those guys back when it was dominant -- we have a chance to do things they weren’t able to do,” junior defensive end Mario Edwards Jr. said. “He constantly lets us know we have an opportunity in front of us to do things even the great ones haven’t.”

Edwards was part of the 2012 recruiting class, signing following an 8-4 regular season. It was the eighth straight season in which Florida State failed to secure double-digit wins in the regular season. Edwards bought into Fisher’s vision and the upward trajectory at Florida State in the same way senior Karlos Williams bought in the year before and Lamarcus Joyner and Telvin Smith the previous cycle.

“Being a part of something like this, and from when I first came in and how [Fisher] has changed the program and built it into something like this and contributing to it means a lot,” Williams said.

As Fisher said, though, undefeated regular seasons are secondary to Florida State’s ultimate goal, which doesn’t truly begin until after the regular season takes a bow and exits stage left.

“This season is far from over,” fourth-year junior Terrance Smith said, “so we don’t necessarily see that light [at the end] yet.”

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