Plenty of people are already calling for Mike Norvell to be fired. That is the honest read of message boards, talk radio, and the general mood after back-to-back losing years. Most fans want him gone. There is a version of 2026 where he saves the job and there is a version, more likely at this point, where he does not. The truth is Norvell would probably have been let go after last season if the buyout number was not what it is. Every athletic director in the country understands that dynamic. So does every booster. If this season goes really badly, the move could come mid-year, not in December. And whenever the phone calls happen, they are going to have to answer one question first. If not Norvell, then who?
Here is the argument the rest of the country is not going to want to hear. If it comes to that, Florida State should call Jimbo Fisher.
Start with the resume that matters here. Jimbo won the last national title this program has, and he did it with a roster he mostly built himself. He recruited to Tallahassee at a level nobody has approached since. He ran an offense that treated the quarterback position like an NFL feeder. Whatever anyone thinks about the way his second act at Texas A&M ended, and there is plenty to think, he was very good at the college part of the job when he was here. That is not nostalgia. That is receipts.
The recruiting piece is the strongest part of the case. FSU's biggest strategic problem right now is not scheme. It is roster. This program has been trying to bridge the gap through the portal for three years, and the portal is a rental model that turns over every offseason. The way to actually rebuild is high-school recruiting, and the way to recruit high school kids in Florida is to send somebody they and their families already trust. Jimbo has that credibility in south Florida the way almost no active head coach does. He also has it in Louisiana, in Georgia, and in the parts of Texas that FSU has never been able to consistently mine. Hand him a real NIL budget and he goes back to being the best 18-year-old evaluator in the region inside a cycle.
The second piece is money, and this is the part people forget. Jimbo is still being paid by Texas A&M on one of the largest buyouts in college sports history. That means whatever number FSU would need to make him whole is smaller than the market rate for any other name in this tier. A program that just had to buy out Norvell is going to be sensitive to that. The cheapest path back to a Power Four name with a title on the resume runs directly through a coach whose next salary is already being subsidized by a school in College Station. Nobody else on the plausible list has that math.
The third piece is the one the fanbase feels but does not always say out loud. Fisher won here. That matters when you are trying to sell tickets in a stadium that has had trouble getting to 60,000 for stretches of the last four years. It matters when you are trying to keep collectives writing checks. And it matters when the ACC is watching to see whether FSU is still a program that can be one of the two teams that hosts a title conversation every November. Bringing back the last guy who did that is not a bad marketing pitch. It is a very good one.
The counterarguments are real and they are worth naming. The A&M tenure ended badly. He was accused of losing rooms. He never adjusted his offense as the sport changed under him. The 2020 team came apart. These are all fair. The response is that most of those problems are problems of context, not of competence. Jimbo needed the right AD, the right budget, and a specific kind of program culture. He had it here once. He could have it again with a different chief of staff and an NIL apparatus that did not exist the first time.
None of this is a prediction. Norvell might beat SMU on Monday, get the defense right in October, and shut this whole conversation down by Halloween. But if the season falls apart, whether the call comes in October or after the finale, the boosters should stop pretending the obvious name is a scandal. It is the best available combination of proven recruiter, discounted price tag, and a fanbase that would show up on day one. It is the case for Jimbo, if it comes to that.