Jimbo Fisher May Not Be Able to Fix the Mess at Florida State

Jimbo Fisher didn't intend to sound desperate, but that didn't stop the urgency from seeping into his voice.

"Play from the start, to the finish," he implored his team the night before Saturday's game against North Carolina. "We need the best version of you tomorrow. That's it. That's not asking too much. It's asking what you're capable of."

This, like most every other moment of consequence fit for public consumption, was being documented by Showtime for A Season with Florida State. It was a plea disguised as a pep talk. Fisher's Seminoles entered the game with a conference loss to Louisville; they were one week away from rivalry tilt against a Miami program that has already fumigated any last stench of Al Golden's ineptitude, and three weeks from a game against Clemson, which might be the best team in America. North Carolina, meanwhile, boasted a high-octane offense and ranks among the ACC's upper-middle class, a designation that actually means something given the conference's impressive depth this season.

FSU needed this game. Fisher, whose grip on the program has seemingly slackened ever since the champagne dried after FSU's 2013 national championship win, definitely needed it.

So he kept going.

"Don't be a player that's interested; be a player that's committed," he urged. "It's called strain. It's called guts. It's called grit."

The camera flit back and forth between clumps of players, and Fisher's words may as well have been raindrops sliding down a windshield.

Still, more:

"I'm coming to do a job. And I'm committed to what I'm doing. Do. Your. Job. Do your job."

Florida State did not do its job against North Carolina. The Seminoles lost the game on a 54-yard field goal to drop to 3-2. They now must top undefeated Miami in Coral Gables—if the game does indeed happen, given Hurricane Matthew—to avoid their first 0-3 conference start since 2009, the year before Fisher became head coach. It's the culmination of myriad concerns, most of which have gone on long enough that it's fair to wonder if Fisher is capable of fixing this team.

As ever in Tallahassee, this is not a talent issue. Over the past five years, FSU's average recruiting ranking at Rivals.com is fifth nationally. Ability is not the reason why no one on the roster, save Dalvin Cook and DeMarcus Walker, has played above reproach.

Deondre Francois provides a solution at quarterback that last year's starter Sean Maguire never could, but his miserable performance versus Louisville was a testament to how no redshirt freshman shy of Jameis Winston can be expected to carry an offense—and the current version of the ACC is far deeper than what Winston wrangled with in his two years at FSU.

The Seminoles are no closer to finding replacement receivers for Kelvin Benjamin and Nick O'Leary, now in the NFL. The closest they've come is senior Bobo Wilson, who serves as both a success story—five-foot-nine water bug made good—and a damning indictment—on pedigree, he is one of the least-regarded players in the unit—of a group that should teem with difference makers. One-time five-star signee Ermon Lane, the most talented player in the current bunch, recently shifted to safety after barely making a squeak on offense.

The defense has given up more points over its first five games than any Seminole group in history. It ranks 94th nationally in yards per game, can't puncture an offensive line when it matters, and is generally so hapless without human transformer Derwin James that members of the offense piped up about needing to bail them out despite ringing up almost 600 yards against UNC.

The Noles haven't finished lower than 66th in teams with the fewest penalty yards per game since Fisher took the helm in 2010, but needless mistakes, lowlighted by 100 penalty yards in the second half of the UNC game alone, have sunk them to an untenable 124th place.

And then there's the "loafing," Fisher's pet word for a sustained lack of effort. It culminated in the UNC game, during which linebacker Matthew Thomas and defensive end Josh Sweat leisurely trotted in pursuit of a pass to the flat to UNC receiver Thomas Jackson, presuming that their teammates had the play under wraps. They did not: Jackson, a former walk-on, shook two tackles and barged toward the end zone, handing Carolina the lead with just over two minutes to go. This was not an isolated incident, but even if it were, it raises the question of how fine-tuned the Seminole machine could possibly be if players grow lax in the waning minutes of a tie game.

There are serious late-era Pete Carroll hallmarks here: the eroding discipline, the underdeveloped star recruits, the inability to combat a long-standing brain drain of assistant coaches with fresh replacements. Most of all, the inevitable losses to inferior competition: NC State and UNC in 2010, Wake Forest and Virginia in 2011, NC State again in 2012, Georgia Tech last year, and now UNC for a second time. The rising tide of speculation linking Fisher to LSU has been impossible to ignore, but far more intriguing is an undercurrent of thought that, presuming LSU becomes a real option, maybe he should leave. Like the majority of good coaches, Fisher may be a better architect than maintainer, far more adept at razing and rebuilding than puttering around and making repairs.

Or perhaps Fisher is more of a Mack Brown, a good coach whose transcendent quarterback elevated him into higher esteem than he might otherwise deserve. The comparison isn't note-perfect—Brown's tenure at Texas is double Fisher's at FSU, and unlike Brown, Fisher takes care of business in rivalry games (he is 5-1 against Florida and 6-0 against Miami)—but it's in the right key. Brown did not have a single one-loss season at Texas before going a combined 24-1 in two seasons with Vince Young at the controls, and the only two seasons afterward came on the back of Colt McCoy. Fisher is 27-1 with Winston and 44-15 without, with only one season of fewer than three losses (not counting 2016, which will almost certainly not break that cycle).

Cherry-picking win-loss records can be reductive, of course, but Winston's teams also demonstrated an offensive balance and overall facility to shrug off self-inflicted wounds that FSU hasn't otherwise experienced in the Fisher era. There was an inevitability to those teams, an invincibility that no threat apparently could—let alone would—pierce. The farther removed FSU gets from those years, the easier it becomes to hypothesize whether Fisher's overall competence was among those concerns all along.

Saturday could be a flashpoint. Whatever his shortcomings, Fisher has earned a great deal of cushion for how dependably he's snuffed out the Seminoles' most detested rivals. Miami is the betting favorite to change that. Under Mark Richt, the Hurricanes are as energized as the Seminoles are enervated. In Brad Kaaya, they possess a quarterback able to mince FSU's 93rd-ranked pass defense the way Trubinsky and Lamar Jackson already have so precisely. Because Fisher has always bested them so proficiently, he now finds himself in a no-win situation. Win, and he only does what's expected of him; lose, and detractors are free to tut-tut him for no longer delivering on his greatest selling point.

He oozed defiance on Monday, two days after the UNC loss. Fisher brashly dismissed the idea of a looming civil war between his offense and defense ("That will never happen here"), promised retribution for the loafing ("Gassers will be applied like Mickey [Andrews, FSU's former defensive coordinator] did back in the day") and offered up schematic tweaks (pretty much everywhere in the back seven) as cause for moving forward.

"No one around here is used to losing and we're not going to get used to losing," he chuffed.

It hopscotched between confidence and alarm, which is what coaches tend to do when things are teetering but have not yet toppled. At 50, Fisher has years, perhaps decades, ahead of him as a difference-making coach, and after all he's accomplished, even a catastrophic 2016 season wouldn't get him fired.

The night before the loss to UNC, Fisher told his players to do their jobs.

"What'd I leave off of that, DeMarcus?" he quizzed one of his defensive linemen.

There was no answer on the audio. He may have been saying it to them or he may have just been saying it for himself, but Fisher purred the words he wanted to hear anyways:

"Do your job well."

It's time to wonder whether Fisher can do the same.

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