For the record, the conclusion is that he has to be fired. As soon as possible. It’s overdue, and whatever constraints are delaying the decision will soon be outweighed by the cost of that delay.
He can and will field a team capable of physically dominating Alabama and losing to Stanford in the same year. There are zero downside assurances with Mike Norvell, and his ceiling is increasingly proving to be an outlier. So wins are hard to cherish for long, or at all for many.
The ceiling should be a reasonable shot at a national title in any given year. A floor should be 8ish wins. Not 2. That’s the Norvell paradox. He can and will field a team capable of losing to Jax State and beating a top 5 team in the same year.
When an invested, competitive program pays a coach $10M+ a year, they’re not just paying for the upside. They’re also paying for reasonable assurance of an institutional floor. The range of outcomes needs to be reliably compressed. An impossibility with Mike Norvell.
I’m not gonna write an essay, but a lil thread will do. Norvell proved a brief glimpse of a very high ceiling and immediately followed it up with 2 of the worst seasons in program history. His results are too widely distributed. Too high variance.
There are ppl who won’t get this and frame it as needlessly negative/miserable, but it’s actually at the crux of the Norvell Paradox. In this essay, I will…
Florida State struggled to put up 34 points against Central Arkansas.
Meanwhile, an in-state rival with a brand new Head Coach just dropped 50+ on the #4 team in the country.