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My History as a Seminole Fan — Part Nine: The Lost Decade

For most of my life as a Florida State fan, losing had been the exception.

That was the first thing that changed.

For fourteen straight seasons, from 1987 through 2000, Florida State won at least ten games and finished every season ranked in the AP Top Five.

Think about that.

Fourteen years.

Fourteen seasons of expectations that would be almost impossible for any program to sustain.

I had grown up believing that Florida State was supposed to be one of the best teams in the country every single year.

Not occasionally.

Not when everything broke right.

Every year.

Then came the 2000s.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, that changed.

It didn’t happen all at once.

The 2000 season wasn’t a disaster.

Far from it.

Florida State went 11–2, won the ACC, beat Florida 30–7, and finished No. 5 in the country.

But the season ended with a loss to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.

13–2.

A year earlier, that kind of season would have felt like a disappointment.

And maybe that’s part of the problem.

The standard had become so high that being the fifth-best team in the country didn’t feel like success.

We had become accustomed to playing for championships.

Now we were playing for consolation.

And then came 2001.

That’s when I think the change became real.

Florida State went 8–4.

Eight wins.

For most college football programs, that’s a good season.

For Florida State, it felt like something had gone terribly wrong.

The Seminoles lost to North Carolina 41–9.

They lost to Miami 28–27.

They lost to NC State 34–28.

They lost to Florida 37–13.

For the first time since I had been old enough to really understand what Florida State football was supposed to be, the Seminoles weren’t playing for the ACC championship.

The streak was over.

Florida State still went to a bowl and beat Virginia Tech in the Gator Bowl.

But something had changed.

The expectation of greatness was still there.

The greatness itself was becoming harder to find.

The next few years were confusing.

Florida State returned to the top of the ACC in 2002.

But the season ended 9–5 after a loss to Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

Nine wins.

Five losses.

That number still looks strange to me attached to a Bobby Bowden team.

Then came 2003.

And for a moment, it felt like maybe everything was going to be okay.

Florida State won ten games.

The Seminoles won the ACC.

They beat Florida 38–34 in one of the wildest games of the rivalry, with Chris Rix tossing a bomb to PK Sam in the end zone for the winning score.

Bobby Bowden passed Joe Paterno to become the winningest major-college football coach in history.

The Seminoles were back in the Orange Bowl.

For a little while, it felt like the old Florida State.

But the championship was still out of reach.

Florida State lost to Miami in the Orange Bowl.

Another good season.

Another ten-win season.

Another reminder that good wasn’t what I had grown up expecting.

Then came the middle of the decade.

Nine wins.

Eight wins.

Although Florida State won the inaugural ACC Championship Game in 2005 and earned another Orange Bowl appearance, the Seminoles lost to Penn State in triple overtime.

And by then, the phrase that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s was becoming increasingly familiar:

Florida State is having a good season.

Good.

Not great.

Not playing for a national championship.

Good.

In 2006, Florida State went 7–6.

Bobby Bowden was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame that year, and the Seminoles extended their remarkable bowl streak to 25 consecutive appearances.

But the football itself had become inconsistent.

The next year was worse.

7–6.

Florida State still made a bowl.

Bobby Bowden still had a winning season.

He even recorded his 300th victory at Florida State.

But nobody watching the program could pretend it was the same Florida State anymore.

And yet, I kept watching.

That’s the part I think matters most.

Because this series isn’t really about Florida State’s records.

It’s about why I kept coming back.

I had now been a fan for nearly twenty years.

I had watched Florida State become a national power.

I had watched Charlie Ward win a championship.

I had watched the 1999 team go wire to wire at No. 1.

I had watched my own life change alongside the program.

I had met Liz.

I had married her.

I had become a father.

My boys were growing up.

And Florida State was growing old.

Bobby Bowden was no longer the young coach I had watched when I first became a fan.

The program around him was changing, too.

Recruiting was changing.

College football was changing.

The Seminoles were trying to keep pace.

Sometimes they did.

Sometimes they didn’t.

In 2008, Florida State went 9–4 and finished ranked No. 21.

That season included a 41–39 win at Miami, one of those ridiculous games that reminded me there was still some of the old Florida State magic left.

But it was becoming harder to find.

Then came 2009.

Bobby Bowden’s final season.

Florida State finished 6–6 in the regular season.

Six wins.

The same program that had once gone fourteen straight years without finishing outside the AP Top Five was now fighting simply to reach bowl eligibility.

And yet, somehow, Bowden’s final game became one last reminder of who he had been.

Florida State went to the Gator Bowl and beat West Virginia, Bowden’s former program.

After the game, his players carried him off the field.

It was the end of an era.

Bobby Bowden was gone.

And with him went the last living connection to the Florida State I had discovered as a kid.

The Lost Decade

I call these years the Lost Decade.

Not because Florida State accomplished nothing.

They won ACC championships.

They kept the bowl streak alive.

They produced great players.

Bobby Bowden passed milestone after milestone.

There were still great games.

Still great Saturdays.

Still moments when I found myself yelling at the television.

But something had been lost.

The expectation.

The fear other teams had of Florida State.

The feeling that if the Seminoles were playing, they were probably going to win.

And perhaps most importantly, I had lost the feeling that a national championship was always just around the corner.

For most of my life, Florida State football had been a constant.

Then, sometime during the 2000s, the constant became the uncertainty.

And I learned something that I probably should have known all along:

Being a fan is easy when your team is winning.

It’s easy when you’re watching national championships.

It’s easy when every Saturday feels like an event.

The harder question is what happens when the Saturdays aren’t so special anymore.

I kept watching.

Of course I did.

Because I wasn’t just a fan of the team that won.

I was a fan of Florida State.

And after twenty years, that wasn’t something I could simply turn off because the wins became harder to find.

The kid who had leaned against that chain-link fence in 1989 was long gone.

So was the young man who watched Charlie Ward win a championship.

I was a husband.

A father.

A grown man with a life that had nothing to do with whether Florida State won a football game.

And yet, every Saturday, I still cared.

Maybe that’s when I finally understood what being a fan actually meant.

Not when they were winning.

When they weren’t.

And somewhere on the other side of the 2000s, I was about to find out just how low this thing could go.

Because the Lost Decade wasn’t over yet.

And neither was I done watching.