Hopefully longtime readers of the Misery Index understand that it is mostly a semi-serious vehicle to look back at each college football Saturday and analyze some of the more notable results through the lens of angry fandom — which, in the end, is what makes people so passionate about the sport to begin with.
Rarely is watching this sport or being a fan of a team associated with actual, real life misery. It’s just entertainment, after all. But for maybe the first time in a decade of doing this every week, we saw that very thing unfold Saturday at Florida State.
There’s nothing snarky or funny to say about what happened to the Seminoles against North Alabama, when quarterback Jordan Travis was carted of after a run that ended with part of his lower body bent the wrong way. Though the official diagnosis had not been given Saturday night, we don’t really need one. It’s bad, and it’s almost certainly going to end his season and Florida State’s hopes of making the College Football Playoff.
Quite simply, it’s heartbreaking. It’s brutal. It’s the one truly miserable part of the sport.
The Seminoles eventually won the game, 58-13, but that hardly mattered. You could tell in the body language on their sideline and in the morose tone of coach Mike Norvell’s halftime interview that the score didn’t seem so important.
For the team, for the coaching staff and for the fans, this is as bad as it gets. Florida State had been building for years toward a season like this, and it could hardly have been going better. The Seminoles had passed every test, starting in Week 1 with LSU and running all the way through the ACC schedule. All that realistically stood between Florida State and the playoff was a trip to underwhelming Florida next week and a date with Louisville in the ACC championship game.
Everyone who plays or watches football understands that an entire season or career can change with one bad step or one dangerous tackle. But the idea that it would happen in a throwaway game against an FCS team? Who could even come up with something so awful?
Travis, a sixth-year senior, had improved every year in Norvell’s program to the point where he became one of the best quarterbacks in the sport. He didn’t deserve his college career to end this way, and neither did his teammates, whose hopes of doing something special this season were largely in his hands.
But that’s the reality for Florida State, and it just stinks. There’s not much more you can say.
For the sport of college football, though, it’s also a big potential problem.
Let’s say the Seminoles find a way to beat Florida and Louisville anyway and are sitting there at 13-0 on Dec. 3. Typically, an unbeaten Power Five conference champion would have no issue getting into the College Football Playoff.
But the field is chosen by a committee whose charge is to pick the four best teams in the country. With Travis, an unbeaten Florida State would pretty clearly be in that group. Without Travis, it seems like a stretch.
If Florida State does manage to finish off an unbeaten year, it would be pretty cruel — especially under these circumstances — to leave out a team that’s done everything it was supposed to do. But the purpose of the Playoff is to decide a national title, and a team that loses its starting quarterback and offensive engine in the 11th game of the season isn’t the same team that we saw through the first 2½ months.
In the NFL, it doesn’t matter. If you qualify for the playoffs but suffer a major injury at the end of the season that dooms your chances of winning the Super Bowl, you’re still in the playoffs. For better or worse, college football doesn’t work that way. It’s a somewhat subjective endeavor, and at least until next season when it expands to 12 teams, there are only four spots available.
The CFP committee has been very lucky over the years to avoid pretty much any truly tough decision. But this FSU situation could present a real conundrum when they have to weigh what’s best for the playoff with what’s fair.
If an injury against North Alabama is what costs the Seminoles a playoff bid that seemed so likely when they woke up Saturday morning, it has to go down as one of the unluckiest moments in the history of the sport.
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