John Thrasher knew how the words would sound. He even warned his audience in advance that “I shouldn’t talk much trash.” But the Florida State University president was feeling good as he stood at the lectern in front of a room of Seminoles fans in August 2017.
The Orange Bowl trophy was at Thrasher’s left, marking Florida State’s victory against Michigan nine months earlier. Now, as a new season approached, the Seminoles were ranked third in the country and a date against No. 1 Alabama loomed.
“I think we’re going to beat Alabama,” Thrasher said. “Pretty bad.”
The crowd roared with approval. The Seminoles were a college football powerhouse, fresh off their fifth straight New Year’s Six bowl game and four years removed from a national title, with nearly four decades of unrivaled consistency in the sport. The Florida State football program feared no one.
Behind the success, however, the cracks in the program’s foundation were obvious to anyone who cared to look deeper: A coach who flirted with a seemingly endless string of deep-pocketed suitors. A contentious power struggle among the program’s leadership. Demands for bigger and better facilities stressing an already tight budget. A pervasive attitude of entitlement within the locker room. Declining academic performance. And a string of high-profile, off-field trouble that bruised the program’s reputation.
The dysfunction could be overlooked in service of the common goal: victories on the field.
But, by the end of 2017, Jimbo Fisher, the head coach throughout Florida State’s most recent run of success, was gone. A year after that, FSU’s 36-season bowl streak ended. And, another year after that, the Seminoles were onto their third different head coach in four seasons.
Florida State’s downturn is similar to those of other blue blood programs such as Michigan, Texas and Nebraska, but the details are unique to a place that prided itself on being the last successful mom-and-pop shop in the sport’s new era, caught between the homespun success of Bobby Bowden’s 34 years at the helm and the increasingly high-stakes demands of the big-money enterprise college football has become. It was a program defined by history with no clear vision for the future.
“I really do think moving forward we have in place what we need to be a great program,” athletic director David Coburn said. “We have a great young head coach [in Mike Norvell]. We have a top-20 public university to sell. We are in a wonderful recruiting area, and we still have a great brand. With those kinds of pieces in place, I’m very optimistic that we will get back to the upper echelon.”
But how did a program that won 29 straight games just six years ago fall apart so quickly, and what obstacles remain as first-year coach Norvell works to rebuild an iconic brand?
ESPN spoke with more than 50 people, including former coaches, players, athletic department employees and Seminole Boosters members, to explore what went wrong. While many key people spoke on the record, numerous sources asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak more candidly about the program. Sources close to Fisher and Willie Taggart wanted to “correct the narrative” they believed the school created to shift blame, while other longtime administrators and boosters said they simply wanted to see changes made to get the program back to where they believe it belongs.
With wounds still fresh, feelings still hurt and blame pointed in multiple directions, one common belief surfaced: Before Florida State’s football program can move forward, it must reckon with its past.
The 2014 season: Beginning of the end
Antonor Winston’s phone pinged around dinnertime on a Friday in September 2014. It was Fisher. Winston’s son Jameis had been at the center of another controversy. After previously being investigated for sexual assault and suspended by the baseball team for shoplifting, the superstar QB had recently stood atop a dining hall table and shouted a derogatory joke that underscored what many outside of Tallahassee believed: Fisher turned a blind eye to bad behavior in favor of on-field victories.
Florida State had already announced that Winston would be suspended for the first half of the Seminoles’ showdown against Clemson, a game that would likely determine which team would win the ACC. Fisher agreed to the suspension, but many outsiders believed it was a slap on the wrist. That’s why Fisher was calling.
“The son of a bitch caved to the media,” Fisher said, according to Winston’s father.
Fisher was talking about then-athletic director Stan Wilcox, who changed his mind just over 24 hours before kickoff and suspended Winston for the full game. Fisher, who found out as he and the players boarded the team bus to their hotel, had already designed his game plan around Winston’s expected return.
Fisher lambasted the unilateral decision-making so close to kickoff, and sources said he floated the idea he might quit.
“He had other [job] offers at the time,” one source close to Fisher said. “It was a f—ing zoo.”
Said another source: “He was never going to quit, but he was extremely frustrated.”
The Winston debacle was the latest in a string of battles Fisher waged with the athletic department. The coach viewed Wilcox as “a basketball guy,” hired from Duke in 2013, without the experience needed to lead an elite football program. Fisher also volleyed with Andy Miller, then-president of Seminole Boosters — an external entity that had significant control over FSU’s spending — about money he wanted for staff and facilities. (Miller retired in 2020 after 45 years with the Boosters.)
“[Fisher] was demanding and emotional, and there was always something more,” one longtime booster told ESPN. “Donors would say, ‘Man, we can’t satisfy this guy.'”
Fisher believed the football program deserved nearly unilateral support but often found pushback from Wilcox and Miller, who understood FSU’s unique donor pool. Florida State’s alumni base is comparatively young, and its football success didn’t begin in earnest until the 1980s, one Seminole Boosters board member said. That makes for an often shallow pool of big-dollar donors, combined with what is among the most geographically dispersed fan bases of any major school in the country.
“He’d been in the SEC, and maybe he’d seen that when Nick [Saban] wants something, he gets it really quick,” the booster said of Fisher, who’d been an assistant under Saban at LSU. “Florida State, there was a delay where we had to go raise the money for a project that doesn’t generate revenue.”
When Fisher’s son was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia in 2011, the coach was eager to kickstart a fundraising program called Kidz First, but Miller worried the foundation would serve as competition for the already scarce amount of donations from the same market of fans. According to several of the coach’s close associates, Fisher viewed Miller’s pushback as personal, and the relationship became poisoned beyond repair.
Miller’s power over the purse strings, according to numerous athletic department officials, also prevented Florida State from hiring more established candidates for the athletic director job. Many officials said Wilcox was ill-equipped to maneuver the entrenched network of local power brokers unique to Florida State and lost support when the man who hired him, FSU president Eric Barron, left for Penn State within a year.
“You could tell when the three of them [Fisher, Miller and Wilcox] were in the room there was something going on,” one prominent FSU booster said. “Kind of like when your parents were upset at each other, you knew it but they never said anything. It was that obvious.”
Fisher declined to be interviewed for this story, but he issued a statement through Texas A&M saying, “Florida State was great to me and my family and I have many fond memories and lifelong friends in Tallahassee, but my focus is on Texas A&M.” Wilcox, who is now the NCAA’s executive vice president of regulatory affairs, also declined to be interviewed, saying his current role would make it inappropriate to comment on a member institution.
The dispute was a far cry from Florida State’s golden era under Bowden, who turned the Seminoles into a football powerhouse, winning two national titles and more than 300 games during his tenure. One who never publicly discussed finances or feuded with the administration, Bowden had a down-home affability and willingness to win with less that shaped an ecosystem that remains ensconced in the fabric of Florida State.
“It was just very hard to make that adjustment to a guy who really never was collaborative, was rarely appreciative and almost never respectful,” one high-ranking official said. “Maybe it was [like] ‘Welcome to the real world,’ but I’m not sure our folks were prepared for it.”
If Fisher was brusque, however, those close to him believed it was out of necessity. Bowden’s tenure also ended poorly, as a contingent of boosters ushered the aging coach out the door after many years of mediocrity. As one source said, many at FSU wanted Fisher’s record with Bowden’s budget. But Fisher saw Clemson’s program expanding, including plans for a $55 million football facility that opened in 2017, and he believed Florida State needed to keep pace.
“He knew if Florida State didn’t jump on top of it right away, Clemson would eventually overtake everyone,” one Fisher staffer said. “Their administration on down, everyone was in alignment with the vision of the program and totally committed to doing what it takes to make football successful.”
Fisher’s frustration with the administration was mirrored on the field, where many of the same players who had helped him win a national championship in 2013 had turned their attention toward the NFL rather than a repeat performance. Several veterans routinely faked injuries to get out of practice, according to sources on the team and on the staff, while others went through the motions without the same intensity that defined the title team.
“That 2014 team was more talented than the 2013 team,” former FSU fullback Freddie Stevenson said. “But a lot of guys’ minds weren’t in the same place.”
Said another member of the 2013 title team: “I took it for granted, winning a national championship. I was like, ‘We did it once, we can do it again. It’s going to be easy.'”
FSU kept winning, but the season was defined by close calls, including an overtime thriller against Clemson played with Winston sequestered to the sideline. The Seminoles entered the 2014 College Football Playoff riding a 29-game winning streak, but the last four of those wins came by a total of just 14 points.
The lackadaisical approach came to a head on the practice field in December 2014, when Fisher ripped into his team in advance of a Rose Bowl showdown against Oregon. “They’re going to blow y’all out if you all come to play how you’ve played all year,” he screamed.
The game was indeed a disaster. Florida State turned the ball over on five of its first six possessions in the second half, and the Seminoles’ winning streak ended with a 59-20 blowout.
As one former member of the athletic staff remembered upon watching that game, “[I was] thinking, this is the football gods saying, ‘No more.'”
Cultural decline in the Seminoles’ program
The air of invincibility evaporated over the seasons that followed the Rose Bowl loss on New Year’s Day 2015. The Florida State roster drifted further from the intensely competitive forces of Winston, Nick O’Leary and Lamarcus Joyner to a cast of highly touted recruits who often struggled to adapt to Fisher’s demanding practices and Tallahassee’s nightlife.
Stevenson said altercations were common between veterans of FSU’s best years and younger players who lacked the focus and drive to win at a high level, and he worried what would become of the team after those veterans left.
“We were banking on the success of the past,” said one former player. “Everybody lost their way. It was almost like we expected to be good because we were at Florida State.”
Nowhere was this more obvious than at quarterback. Fisher’s latter years amounted to a patchwork of bad options, while Clemson signed two generational talents in Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence, has won the ACC every year since 2015, and played for four of the past five national championships.
Fisher still landed a handful of big-name quarterbacks on the recruiting trail, but none panned out. By 2020, every high school QB he signed from 2013 through 2017 had left the program before completing his eligibility.
Florida State’s offensive line was another concern. Under position coach Rick Trickett — an old-school, hard-nosed coach who routinely lambasted players with salty language and ferocious bluster — the unit became an annual underachiever, with fans casting Trickett as the villain. Many recruits struggled with Trickett’s approach; among the 19 offensive linemen signed between 2013 and 2017, just one went on to be drafted in the NFL, while nearly half didn’t finish their careers at Florida State. There was a similar path at receiver, with blue-chip recruits such as George Campbell and Ermon Lane failing to develop into stars, while the defense, despite stars such as Jalen Ramsey and Derwin James, often failed to match the lofty expectations set during Fisher’s best seasons.
Fisher signed the ACC’s top-ranked class every year from 2013 through 2017, but the pedigree rarely translated to on-field success. His final five classes included 69 blue-chip recruits, and only 12 have been drafted so far (about half the national average). Of the 115 high school players he signed in total from 2013 to 2017, less than half became full-time starters. Meanwhile, 44 of them failed to finish their careers with Florida State by virtue of dismissal, transfer or medical disqualification. The failures were heaviest at QB, linebacker, receiver and offensive line, leaving FSU’s roster top-heavy at some positions and bereft of talent at others.
While every Fisher-era player we spoke to agreed the culture within the locker room deteriorated after 2013, none pointed the finger at Fisher and most believed his frustrations with administration were the larger issue.
“A lot of guys who were supposed to step up never lived up to who they were supposed to be. I even put myself under that,” said Chad Mavety, a prized juco prospect on the offensive line whose career was marred by injuries. “It’s tough to rely on guys who aren’t showing up and doing what they’re supposed to do.”
In the aftermath of Fisher’s departure, Florida State boosters and administration suggested Fisher ignored recruiting toward the end of his tenure as he eyed other jobs, but every Fisher staff member we spoke with insisted this was not true and noted the staff met daily for two-and-a-half hours to discuss recruiting targets.
“Recruiting goes on Jimbo’s ego,” one staff member said. “He wants to be known as the baddest motherf—er in the world, whether he’s recruiting to Florida State or wherever. That’s in Jimbo’s DNA.”
Talent wasn’t the only concern. By 2017, Florida State football’s academic progress rate was the worst of any Power 5 institution and fifth-worst in the FBS. Several Fisher staff members said the coach begged the administration for more academic support, including an academic center for players, but was told by Miller that funding would be difficult to come by for a project deemed “not sexy.”
Florida State pushed back on the assertion that Fisher didn’t have enough resources in this area, saying it added numerous staff members to its academic support unit that were specific to football. “Academic support is a really important resource, but they’ve got no teeth if they don’t have support from the coaching staff and namely the head coach,” one administration source said.
Some players also got into trouble off the field, including multiple allegations of assault against women and a credit card theft scam that ended in the shooting death of one player’s half-brother. Just weeks after Fisher left, a series of break-ins occurred in the football housing complex. Police reports said the suspects were former FSU players who had robbed their own teammates of jewelry, cash and even an Orange Bowl championship ring.
Fisher’s final blue-chip QB recruit, Deondre Francois, was an example of the tenuous grasp coaches had on the culture. Francois was critical to FSU’s success, but he was often unengaged with teammates, one Fisher era coach said, and after a season-ending injury in 2017, he stopped showing up to team activities, including the Seminoles’ game against Delaware State. A month after Fisher’s departure, police responded to an alleged domestic violence situation involving Francois and his girlfriend. No one was charged, and the case was closed after the responding officer determined there was not enough probable cause to make an arrest for battery. Three months later, police raided Francois’ apartment after an anonymous tip that suggested Francois had accounting ledgers, firearms and more than 2 pounds of marijuana in his home. Surveillance revealed assorted drug paraphernalia, along with a hand grinder and zip bags containing marijuana residue that an officer said was typical of a sales operation, according to an affidavit from police. The subsequent police raid, however, found less than an ounce of marijuana, and Francois was cited for misdemeanor possession.
“What we inherited may have been one of the roughest, hardest to deal with groups of kids I’ve ever been around,” one Willie Taggart-era assistant said.
From 2015 on, Fisher struggled to regain command of the locker room, often with embarrassing results. It started with the “Yellow Brick Road,” a yellow mat painted to look like the yellow brick road from “The Wizard of Oz” that ran along the path to the practice field. Fisher explained at the time that it was to remind players what their purpose was and “what we have to attain.” For a program two years removed from a national championship, it was seen as a bizarre tactic.
A year later, Fisher followed a humiliating loss against Louisville with a pledge, set in each player’s locker, that opened, “As of Oct. 4, 2016, I promise to give Florida State football my all.” It backfired, with many players finding the pledge beneath them — “clown stuff,” as one former player said.
“Some guys fooled us, and some guys, we took a chance on thinking we could change them,” one former Fisher staff member said. “A lot of that is on the coaches.”
Fisher saw the deteriorating performance at key positions, one source said, but he was loyal to his own staff, and he refused to fire assistants without guarantees he could hire a top-dollar replacement.
According to sources close to Fisher, he approached administration about a budget increase for assistant coaches in 2016, with an eye toward making changes to his staff. His defensive coordinator, Charles Kelly, made $583,000 in 2015 and earned a $250,000 raise the following year, while Clemson paid its defensive coordinator, Brent Venables, $1.5 million in 2016. The school declined Fisher’s request.
“Jimbo is a tough guy but at the end of the day he’s a real guy and if he loves you, he loves you,” a Fisher staff member said. “And he loved those guys. He probably should’ve parted ways with them a couple years earlier but he didn’t.”
At the same time, Fisher was managing his own personal issues. His son’s condition, which could be terminal, was a constant source of stress. In October 2015, Fisher’s closest ally within Florida State’s administration, associate AD for football Monk Bonasorte, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. That same year, Fisher and wife, Candi, separated with the highly publicized divorce finalized in January 2016.
“You don’t have all the energy, all the focus of what you can put into coaching us when you have that going on, turmoil at the house,” one former player said.
Yet, despite the off-field drama and cultural erosion in the locker room, Florida State kept winning, landing bids to New Year’s Six bowls in 2015 and 2016.
But a year later, after Thrasher took the stage to predict a blowout win against Alabama, Florida State’s luck ran out.
Fisher’s end at FSU, start at Texas A&M
Seminoles fans will say the end of the dynasty came with 5:41 left in the 2017 opener versus Alabama. With the Tide up by 17, safety Ronnie Harrison came on a backside blitz, colliding with Francois, who crumpled to the ground and grabbed his knee. Francois was lost for the year. Florida State was forced to turn to a rail-thin freshman named James Blackman, who wrestled through a disastrous season. The losses mounted, and when Texas A&M called with a $75 million contract offer, Fisher took it.
People behind the scenes, however, believe Florida State’s downward spiral started two years earlier, when Bonasorte announced he had brain cancer.
“We were just dysfunction junction,” one former administrator said. “And it became more dysfunctional when Monk got sick.”
In November 2016, Bonasorte died, and 2017 was Fisher’s first season without him.
In a place numerous sources said was defined by “good old boy” politics, Bonasorte was universally loved at Florida State. More importantly, people trusted him. Nearly every source we spoke with, from Seminole Boosters to FSU administration to Fisher’s camp, pointed to Bonasorte’s illness as a turning point.
“People would call him the mayor,” said Bonasorte’s wife, Beverly. “I would go to FSU banquets and booster meetings, and he would kind of plant me in a chair next to somebody while he worked the whole room like he was a politician.”
Monk grew up near Pittsburgh but he played college ball at Florida State. He fell in love with the place. From the mid-1990s, he was an ever-present figure in sports around Tallahassee, but his first love was always Florida State football. In 2008, he was hired as an associate AD, serving as the go-between among warring factions, acting as the de facto athletic director for football and serving as Fisher’s fixer in difficult situations.
Without Bonasorte, tensions over spending escalated to a breaking point. Wilcox focused on several of his goals, including funding an underserved basketball program on the brink of bigger success and promoting a pursuit of comprehensive excellence across all sports. Fisher and Seminole Boosters, meanwhile, often viewed the agenda as counterproductive and siphoning off scarce resources from donors that they believed should have been put toward football.
In June 2016, Fisher had had enough. According to one source privy to the conversation, the coach phoned Thrasher before leaving for a brief summer vacation with an ultimatum: Get FSU a new AD or Fisher would look for work elsewhere. Thrasher, however, was a bigger advocate for Wilcox than Fisher had imagined. Wilcox’s push for “comprehensive excellence” dovetailed with Thrasher’s vision for the school, even if it stood in stark contrast to how things worked at other football powers. In the 2016-17 Learfield Directors’ Cup standings, which measure a school’s success across all sports, Florida State ranked 12th, and every public university ahead of the Seminoles either generated significantly more revenue or didn’t focus resources on football. Meanwhile, Fisher’s archetype for how to invest in football, Alabama, ranked 25th. Rivals such as Miami (56th) and Clemson (52nd) were further behind.
When Fisher returned from his vacation two weeks later, he found that not only had Wilcox not been fired, but Thrasher had offered him a promotion to vice president, along with a nice raise. Meanwhile, Miller fumed over Fisher’s constant entreaties for money at Booster Club meetings, which many Bowden-era donors found off-putting.
“Jimbo was adamant that he wasn’t going to shake hands and kiss babies,” one influential booster said. “And Tallahassee don’t work both ways. You can’t be the kingpin and get the money.”
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