Mark J. Rebilas – USA TODAY Sports
When Everett Golson announced that he would be transferring to the Florida State Seminoles, the reactions came in fast and furious from all over the college football world. Golson was instantly tabbed a Heisman Trophy favorite (14/1 odds according to Bovada) and FSU was getting penciled into the 2015 College Football Playoff before the team’s new quarterback has even found the campus book store.
But there’s a long way to go between now and next season, so it might be time to pump the brakes on the FSU-Golston hype train.
While Golson is an exciting addition to a Seminole team that hasn’t lost a regular season game in over two seasons, there are a lot of hurdles he’s going to have to overcome before he can deliver on the expectations that have followed him to Tallahassee. While leading the Notre Dame Fighting Irish during the 2012 and 2014 seasons, Golson enjoyed flashes of brilliance but suffered stretches of inconsistency and poor judgement that ended up losing him the starting job in South Bend.
During Notre Dame’s run to the BCS National Championship, Golson received a lot of credit for the team’s run to a perfect regular season but his numbers were serviceable at best. He averaged just 194.1 yards per game with 11 passing touchdowns and five interceptions on the year before the team got cut down by the buzzsaw that was the Alabama Crimson Tide 42-14 in the national title game (where Golson threw for 270 yards with a touchdown and an interception). He added six rushing touchdowns during the year as well, averaging a modest 3.2 yards per carry. As a redshirt freshman, the potential for Golson to become a real star in the coming years was evident.
Then he was kicked out of school and missed the entire 2013 season which presented a major hiccup in his development. When he returned to the team in 2014, he looked like the kind of player that many predicted he would become early on, throwing for an average of 260 yards per game with seven passing touchdowns and no interceptions through the first three games of the season while adding four rushing touchdowns. But that was where the wheels started to fall off for Golson. In every game after the September 13 win against the Purdue Boilermakers, Golson accounted for at least one turnover (often multiple) even as his passing become more prolific.
He would average 286.1 yards passing over his final nine starts at Notre Dame but accounted for the second-most turnovers by a quarterback in all of FBS with 14 interceptions and eight lost fumbles. His lack of ball security led to the Irish winning just one of their final six regular season games and forced the team to turn the offense over to Malik Zaire for the Music City Bowl against the LSU Tigers to close out the season. The demotion carried over to spring practices where Zaire came out ahead of Golson on the depth chart, prompting the senior to leave South Bend as a graduate transfer.
Florida State, looking for a replacement for Jameis Winston and apparently unsatisfied with their current crop of quarterbacks, welcomed Golson to Tallahassee with open arms, heaping some unrealistic expectations on the young man. Many will be quick to compare Winston and Golson’s skill sets to try and create a connection between the success of the last two seasons and future success in 2015. Both are mobile quarterbacks with big arms with the ability to improvise. That, in a nutshell, is what has created the overwhelming buzz surrounding the program.
But Golson is not Winston. While the team was able to overcome their former quarterback’s penchant for turnovers in 2014 (he was one of just seven FBS quarterbacks to account for 20 or more turnovers in 2014 and the only one to win at least 10 games), Winston enjoyed a stacked roster around him to help him stage all those memorable comebacks. That supporting cast, unfortunately, isn’t going to be there in September as FSU is in the process of replacing seven offensive starters, including four starters on the offensive line and the team’s most reliable pass catchers in Rashad Greene and tight end Nick O’Leary.
Add in the steep learning curve that Golson will encounter when he finally hits the field with the team in August as he tries to digest a pretty complex playbook. Jimbo Fisher is known for throwing a lot at his offensive players and Golson will have to display a grasp on a good enough chunk of it early on to warrant installing him as the starter.
Everett Golson provides the excitement of possibility, but there is a long road ahead of him if he hopes to meet the lofty expectations that await him at Florida State. Will he be able to carry the burden of the monumental hype that is following him to Tallahassee or will the Noles suffer a step back season in 2015?
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