Breaking down why Florida State retained Mike Norvell

With coaches being fired by their schools left and right this college football season, Mike Norvell managed to make it through with his job. On3’s Pete Nakos and Chris Low reported Sunday that Florida State had decided to bring Norvell back in 2026.

Of course, such things aren’t typically announced at the end of a good season. Norvell was heavily considered on the hot seat prior to that report with the Seminoles sitting at a 5-6 record. They lost Saturday against NC State, and there was serious reason to believe that could be it for Norvell.

But now that the coach is confirmed to be back for a seventh year in Tallahassee, college football analyst Josh Pate believe the answer why is simple. Norvell would have been owed a buyout of roughly $58.4 million if fired at the end of this season, and that was a price FSU either couldn’t afford or wasn’t willing to pay.

“No one wanted to retain Mike Norvell there,” Pate said on Josh Pate’s College Football Show. “It cost too much to fire him. I like Mike Norvell a lot. I loved the dude as a person. I actually think he can be a successful coach. I think they got started down a slippery slope there when it came to roster construction and they’ve never been able to get their footing. By that I mean they leaned on the portal heavy and they killed it one year. That 2023 year they killed it. Then they doubled down on that approach and they never started to build up through high school recruiting. … Anyway, that’s where they are right now, so that’s why he’s being retained.

“It would have cost a ton of money (to fire him) because they got played when Alabama had the job opening and they got tricked into thinking Mike Norvell was a serious candidate for the Alabama job. They were not gonna offer Mike the job. It was always Kalen DeBoer’s job. But the people at Florida State were made to believe that it was Mike’s job to the tune that he got a huge buyout. It’s not the first time that’s happened to someone, and if he were to go on to win it would be a moot point. But he hasn’t gone on to win, so it immediately makes you look at that buyout number and say, ‘We would owe him what? How did that happen?'”

Since directing Florida State to an undefeated record in the regular season and a ACC Championship in 2023, Norvell has gone 7-16 combined across the past two years. If they lose against Florida to close this season, the Seminoles will miss out on a bowl game for the fourth time in six years.

Norvell will assuredly enter next season on the hot seat in what could be his final chance to save his job long term. But Pate wondered how much confidence there is both inside the program as well as outside about the future with him as coach.

“How do you recruit to a place where everyone just assumes the head coach is on borrowed time?” he said. “In the best of worlds, if you had just a staff full of assassin recruiters it would be tough. This staff is not known for its ability to recruit the high school ranks. So it’s gonna be an uphill battle. Now, the answer to that is you’ve got to be willing to pay a premium for talent. You could make the argument that since we’re not spending money on the buyout, we’ll reinvest that money to get better players. They tried that at Florida this past cycle and it didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. It just didn’t work there.

“…This is what has Florida State fans up in arms because they’re looking at it and saying, ‘Everyone knows it’s an inevitability. Why don’t we rip the Band-Aid off right now?’ The retort to that is obvious. Do you guys want to stroke a $60-plus million check? Very few people can afford to. But what was the talk we heard down there? The talk was they had the money. Maybe that did, maybe they didn’t. If they did, they’re not willing to spend it.”

Perhaps Norvell can string together another big portal cycle and recreate that 2023 run. But if he doesn’t, Pate argues that Florida State could run an even bigger risk.

“The biggest risk here is not anger,” Pate said. “If fans are angry, it’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s the second worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is apathy. The worst thing in the world is a half-full house. When you’re in a freshly renovated stadium and it’s like Week 3 or Week 4 next year and already the season’s giving off bad vibes and already we realize all the good things we said in the spring and the summer are just cosmetic and it’s the same old, same old. ‘We’re not going through this again.’ That is the biggest danger.”