Mack Brown went to FSU but he’s never beat them as a coach. Can he halt the skid today?
When Mack Brown said this week that his players wouldn’t take Florida State lightly because “they’ve won a national title during these guys’ lives” it certainly had the distinct barnyard aroma of faint praise.
This Florida State — the one Jimbo Fisher left stripped for parts, sitting on concrete blocks on the lawn when he fled for Texas A&M, now two coaches ago — is a pale shadow of the powerhouse it once was, the team that was once the final boss in every ACC season the way Clemson is now.
And yet it’s still one of the few empty spaces left on Brown’s long resume.
The Seminoles’ arrival in the ACC and ensuing utter domination of the conference coincided perfectly with North Carolina’s emergence under Brown in the ‘90s. Brown never beat his alma mater in three tries when he was at Tulane, went 0-6 during his first stint with the Tar Heels — three of those games eventually decided the ACC championship — and never faced the Seminoles at Texas.
Some of his players weren’t even teenagers yet the last time Florida State won the ACC, and the combination of Clemson’s run of titles and the swelling of the conference through expansion have diluted memories of the way Florida State once rolled through the ACC for just about everyone.
Their excellence, now, is almost impossible to comprehend: Nine straight titles, two national championships, countless Bobby Bowden victory speeches.
The Seminoles didn’t lose an ACC game until they’d been in the league for four years. It was unlike anything the ACC had ever seen. Even modern-day Clemson, which has lost an ACC game or two during its run, can’t claim that kind of advantage. The Seminoles were just exponentially better than everyone else at that moment. It was their era.
“They were so good, but that’s what was wrong,” Brown said. “At that time, Florida State was better and all the rest of us (in the ACC) were second or below because they were the best team in the country.”
When Brown left for Texas, the Seminoles were the only thing standing between North Carolina and ACC dominance of its own. That memory clearly still looms large for the coach. The fifth-ranked Tar Heels are once again what they once were. The Seminoles are not.
It’s nostalgia as much as anything that has launched this game into a prime time ABC slot on Saturday, because the dynamic has certainly changed since the last time Brown faced Florida State.
The ACC’s addition of Florida State was a reaction to the Big Ten’s surprise capture of Penn State. The late Gene Corrigan had been caught flat-footed by that, and the then-commissioner acted quickly to ensure the ACC wouldn’t be left behind as the independent football powerhouses sought conference homes. The Seminoles became the first addition to the ACC since Georgia Tech in 1979, and while that may seem tame compared to subsequent multi-team expansion scrambles, it had an immediate and irreversible impact on the football calculus of the ACC.
For North Carolina, and Brown in particular, the timing was terrible.
It took Brown four seasons to build the Tar Heels into a top-25 team, and they cracked the poll for the first time in 1991, before losing to N.C. State. Clemson won the ACC title that season, the last team to win it other than Florida State for a decade.
Four times in the next six years, both North Carolina and Florida State were ranked in the top 25 when they played — both in the top five in 1996 and 1997. In those years, and in 1993, the winner of the UNC-FSU game would be the ACC champion. The 1997 game, in an overflowing, frenzied and ultimately disappointed Kenan Stadium, was North Carolina’s last game between top-10 teams until the 2015 ACC title game.
It was always Florida State. Every time. The Tar Heels never got closer than 13 points.
That was a long time ago. Clemson is now what Florida State once was, in a very different and much larger ACC. But the Seminoles are still out there for Brown, yet to be vanquished.
His players were not born in 1997. Bowden is long retired. Brown still has unfinished business.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 10:50 PM.
