The sing-song Florida State chant that provided the soundtrack for college football for the good part of a generation has been muted. The gold helmets, elite talent and assembly line of NFL stars that were inherent to Florida State are now firmly part of its history. It’s a history that FSU is stuck in, which is the problem with their upcoming coaching search.

The Florida State football program is facing a crisis, as a program steeped in lore inexplicably got so entrenched in the past that college football has passed them by. Here’s the bad news for Florida State fans in the wake of firing Willie Taggart: The university and athletic department are horribly positioned to catch up.

Florida State should be an elite destination for a college football coach who can roll out of bed and win double-digit games. But it’s unlikely that a high-end Power Five coach would risk leaving a stable situation for Florida State right now, as it’s still being run like it’s 1988.

Florida State football is a monster truck with a rusted-out four-cylinder engine. FSU is shiny and imposing from the outside, but so antiquated administratively that many top coaches will be scared to even take a test drive. “Even though it’s a trainwreck because of the university’s dysfunction, it’s still a top-10 job,” said a collegiate official.

That’s the dichotomy facing the coaches who FSU will attempt to lure. The problem with Florida State is that the university’s mismanagement of the athletic department for decades has undercut the attractiveness of the football job.

How did we get here? A pivotal touchstone would be when athletic director Stan Wilcox left FSU for the NCAA in August of 2018.

View photos Former Florida State coach Willie Taggart watches his team play Wake Forest during a game on Oct. 19. (AP) More

First of all, no sane person voluntarily goes and works at the NCAA in this era, especially from a high-end ACC job. Wilcox’s departure was widely viewed in the industry as him running for greener pastures. Or any pasture. And the fact that FSU swung and missed on so many athletic director candidates to replace him speaks volumes. They ended up with an internal candidate named David Coburn from the campus administration because they struck out so hard. He went from interim to full time in May of this year, and all of college athletics chuckled along while FSU buried itself deeper by anchoring down with one of its own.

None of the established candidates for this job know David Coburn, which means they will be hesitant to work for him. That’s mostly because he’s not expected to be there long term. Neither is university president John Thrasher, who is expected to retire after this year. That’s not to mention shadow AD Andy Miller from Seminole Boosters, who is also planning to retire. No one ever really knew who was in charge at Florida State. And for coaching candidates, well, they still won’t.

The new Florida State coach is projecting to jump off a plank and hope it works out at a place that needs a DeLorean to catch up. To established coaches who preach alignment, stability and relationships, that’s a non-starter. Urban Meyer’s name shouldn’t be mentioned here, and that has nothing to do with Coburn’s clumsy “hit by a bus” comments that exposed his naïveté to the nature of coaching searches.

Meyer would be more likely to go back to the MAC than walk into the administrative mess at Florida State.

Also, Florida State finally announced a restructuring to bring the Seminole Boosters into the athletic department. This is stuff that’s kept FSU so lodged in the past, as this transition should have happened back when SMU was giving out cars to recruits.

What happens when you have this level of administrative uncertainty? You end up paying more than $3 million to hire Willie Taggart (in addition to another $1.3 million to South Florida for the remainder of that deal) and then fork over more than $20 million to buy out him and his entire staff. That’s not just expensive ineptitude, it’s historic.

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