‘They Remember November’: Where Does Florida State Go From Here After Its Heartbreaking Loss In Atlanta?

ATLANTA, GA – If you were playing Coach Speak Bingo with some of the phrases Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher uses repeatedly during his press conferences, you’d have a winning board most of the time. “Eliminate clutter.” “Be a family.” “Buy into the process.” “Control what you can control.”

That carries into the locker room, as well. Fisher continually hammers home similar points. And one of the things he tells the team most frequently in the locker room is, “They remember November.”

“This is when teams can help themselves or hurt themselves,” Seminoles senior defensive back Lamarcus Brutus told Uproxx Sports last week. “If you win, they’ll remember. If you lose, they’ll remember.”

It’s not November, not yet anyway, but nobody’s going to forget the end of Florida State’s loss to Georgia Tech on October 24 any time soon.

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Watch the Seminoles closely through the first half of the year, and you would’ve seen a loss like this coming. Okay, maybe not a loss exactly like this, where a blocked field goal led to chaos and eventually ended in Lance Austin weaving his way 78 yards right in front of the entire Georgia Tech sideline and juking former Groza Award-winner Roberto Aguayo out of his shoes in the process to take it in for the game-winning score after the clock hit zero.

But a loss was coming. That’s why Fisher so vehemently said the things he said throughout the season to an extremely talented, but young (and flawed) team.

“Everyone will focus on the blocked kick,” Tomahawk Nation editor Bud Elliott said on Monday, “but that wasn’t what lost them the game. Florida State’s chance to win came in the first 20 minutes. They blew that chance due to terrible red zone execution and decision making.”

This is a group that hadn’t lost an ACC game in more than three years (Oct. 6, 2012, to be precise), and many players had never known what it felt like to even lose a regular season game. That hadn’t happened in 2013 or 2014.

Star running back Dalvin Cook is one of those players. Cook is enjoying a season where he’s garnered some warranted Heisman buzz, playing noticeably hurt and still putting up 1,037 rushing yards (and 181 yards through the air) on 8.2 yards per carry to go with 12 total touchdowns in the team’s first seven games.

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In Cook’s first season and a half as a Seminole, the only time Florida State didn’t come out on top despite close game after close game was in the College Football Playoff against Oregon. And he definitely had never lost a game in the manner in which Georgia Tech pulled out the win on Saturday.

“It’s something that you would say that had never happened to you,” Cook said after the game. “And I watched it with my own eyes. I ain’t never seen it like that. I watched it with my own eyes tonight. It’d never happened to me.”

For so long, Florida State won regardless of any mistakes it was making. This season in particular, the offense hasn’t been converting red zone opportunities into touchdowns. There have been critical procedural penalties. Missed throws. Drops. The kinds of things that typically lose teams close games.

And yet, the Seminoles were 6-0 and avoided potential disasters against teams like Boston College, Wake Forest and Miami.

Fisher wasn’t doom and gloom after the game in Atlanta, although he took responsibility for the loss and for not having the young guys ready to play.

“Sometimes you worry about winning too much,” Fisher said on Saturday. “It’s not about winning. It’s about the process of playing, and playing well, and being the best you can be. Sometimes you get caught up in winning. I thought we did that a little bit tonight. We were so worried about winning, we forgot to play.”

If that sounds a lot like something Nick Saban would say, that shouldn’t be surprising. Fisher was an assistant under Saban for seven seasons, and he understands The Process as well as anyone. So much so that he’s instilling that same mentality in his players, who scarily find ways to work the phrase into quotes unprompted.

Earlier in the week, cornerback Marquez White was asked about maintaining a high level of play throughout a long regular season winning streak, and Fisher may as well have been speaking through him.

“It’s not about wins,” White said. “It’s about consistently doing your assignment and doing your job. And the winning part handles itself.”

Florida State didn’t do those assignments or its job against Georgia Tech, otherwise they wouldn’t have been in a position to lose on a blocked kick in the first place. Instead, the Seminoles were on the wrong end of a miracle play that will be thrown on highlight packages forever. The saving grace? It still only counts as one loss, and there are times where you can learn more from a loss than a win because it sinks in more.

Teams that continue winning in spite of themselves sometimes reinforce bad habits. Even if the coaching staff is saying all the right things, it might not matter. This team gets an invincibility complex – remember, we are dealing with college kids, after all – and the group collectively mistakes confidence for infallibility.

This Florida State team probably wasn’t going to the College Football Playoff no matter what some fans allowed themselves to believe. There’s a stop gap answer at quarterback, a ton of youth on both sides of the ball, and a long way to go. It can still get better, and that’s what Fisher emphasized in his postgame comments, going so far as to say, “The sky’s not falling.”

The Seminoles have a chance to be remembered in November, and that chance looms large when Florida State plays Clemson in Death Valley on November 7.

“This is when the real teams will start their season,” White said last week. “I feel like we’ll be on top like we always are – and where we expect to be.”

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