Looks to me like Florida State football has a self-made mess.

When Butch Davis was fired at UNC in the summer of 2011 and Dick Baddour stepped down as athletic director, the university moved forward in the correct sequence, which necessitated having an interim head football coach for the 2011 season.

There are two axioms about coaches and athletic directors. Most coaches are reluctant to take a new job somewhere if the athletic director has left or is on the way out for any reason. Coaches want to be hired by a long-term, stable AD. Conversely, athletic directors always like to make their own coaching hires – as long as they turn out well.

So when Carolina named Everett Withers as interim head coach and then spent the rest of the 2011 summer vetting potential ADs before hiring Bubba Cunningham, it had the right sequence. Bubba’s first hire was Larry Fedora after that interim season, and Fedora’s first five years produced four bowl teams and a Coastal Division title in the ACC.

Fedora’s program bottomed out his last two years, and we can debate long and hard how and why that happened. But another axiom for an athletic director is if you have to fire a coach you hired, you better fix the problem ASAP. Cunningham sure did, bringing back Mack Brown.

Florida State football, one of the great college programs in the country for more than 40 years under Bobby Bowden and Jimbo Fisher, looks to have done it the wrong way for several reasons.

First, Willie Taggart was not a universally popular choice in Tallahassee. He was interviewed and recommended to the Trustees by Athletic Director Stan Wilcox in December of 2017. Taggart, who is from Tampa and was head coach at South Florida, got the FSU job after one controversial-filled season at Oregon, where three of his players were hospitalized as the result of grueling workouts held by the weight and strength staff.

Wilcox, a former Duke assistant AD, left in mid-August for a podunk position with the NCAA before Taggart ever coached a game. How do you make the most important hire in Florida State history – succeeding the Bowden-Fisher ACC and national championship years – then bolt and put Taggart’s future in the hands of your successor? Discipline problems on and off the field marked Taggart’s one-and-a-half losing seasons before being fired Sunday with an $18 million buyout.

There are many more losers with FSU’s first football coaching hire in 43 years.

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