Florida State’s “less” is Virginia’s “more”

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Florida State might wake up this weekend and play well, renewing a sense that it can compete for a decent bowl bid and forge a respectable season. We don’t know, but we can allow for that possibility. Maybe the Seminoles are late-bloomers in 2019.

Right now, however, Florida State is a bad football team which cannot play good defense after halftime. The Seminoles have lacked stamina in their first two games this season. They have lacked toughness. They have lacked signs of returning to the standard of play their fans rightly expect.

Virginia — though the season is very early and should not lead to overly definitive pronouncements — has offered the opposite kinds of indications.

Virginia’s authoritative win in Pittsburgh; its defense’s consistent creation of big plays; the offense getting out of the way and being generally responsible; and other displays have marked the Cavaliers as a foremost ACC Coastal contender, arguably the favorite in the division with Miami losing to North Carolina.

The realities might change this weekend and in the coming months, but right now, the short summary of FSU and UVA is that the Noles are bad, the Hoos good.

Stop for a moment and think about that pigskin combination platter.

If you were to imagine any two teams in the ACC reversing roles five years ago, that would rate very close to the top of unexpected football inversions.

Florida State — before the arrival of the Dabo Empire in 2015 — was the ACC’s dominant football program for more than two decades. Virginia, after rising to the top tier of the conference under George Welsh in the 1990s, fell on very hard times in the 21st century, and is still waiting for its first Coastal championship.

Go through the various Power Five conferences and imagine similar comparisons to “Florida State bad, Virginia good.”

Big 12: Oklahoma bad, Kansas good. Texas bad, Iowa State good.

Big Ten: Ohio State bad, Indiana good. Michigan bad, Rutgers good.

SEC: Georgia bad, Vanderbilt good. Alabama bad, Kentucky good.

Pac-12: USC bad, Cal good. Washington bad, Oregon State good.

This is what it is like to see Florida State limp into Charlottesville in terrible form, against a Virginia team which offers legitimate early-season indications of rounding into form and being a very good team which could compete for a New Year’s Six bowl if everything goes right.

This is surely exciting to Virginia fans… and yet scary at the same time.

It would be so much easier, noticeably less complicated, for UVA fans if Florida State had begun its season with better performances. This would still be a very important game… but Florida State wouldn’t carry the smoky flavor of a burning ship into Charlottesville. The scent of a crisis wouldn’t give the Seminoles a measure of desperation heading into this game.

Florida State being worse than expected puts MORE pressure on Virginia to win. Nah, the Hoos don’t need style points, but Florida State’s struggles do make it that much more important for Virginia to secure a victory.

Florida State being a wounded dog doesn’t make a Seminole win more probable, but it does raise the possibility that the Noles will play with an edge borne of the desire to avoid — and respond to — embarrassment, a sensation no athlete wants to absorb on a consistent basis.

It is reasonable to say that Florida State has embarrassed itself through two games. Virginia owns the clear upper hand in this Week 3 game. Virginia should win. Virginia very probably will win, possibly by a huge margin…

… but before the deed is done, this game owns an extra measure of weight it didn’t have before the season began.

This game — in a Virginia-specific context — has gone from “It would be really important to win this game” (the August perspective) to “If we don’t beat THIS Florida State team, what can we possibly expect out of the rest of our season?” That second question is the September 12 perspective attached to this game.

Florida State’s “less” is Virginia’s “more.”

The “more” refers to pressure as much as anything else.

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