TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – After eight months, scores of man hours, and long stretches where it seemed like he might run out of time, Jordan Travis’ journey to become an eligible football player at Florida State is finally over.

That much was ensured on Monday morning, when coach Willie Taggart delivered the news that the ACC had approved Travis’ transfer waiver request. Which means that, combined with the NCAA’s approval late last month, Travis is officially able to compete for the Seminoles this fall.

“I feel great now,” Travis said. “All the stress is gone now, so I can relax and just focus on my game.”

Travis, the younger brother of former FSU baseball star Devon Travis, admits that there were times he thought this moment might never come. And, given the roller coaster he’s been on since arriving at FSU in January, it’s hard to blame him.

But thanks to Travis’ compelling case for a waiver, as well as constant and deliberate efforts by Florida State’s compliance office to bring that case to the NCAA and ACC, those valleys have led to one of the highest peaks of Travis’ young career.

“Compliance worked really hard,” Travis said. “I appreciate them a lot. They did everything they could to get me approved.”

That process began shortly after Travis’ arrival. It then went through a number of twists and turns and didn’t reach its full conclusion until Monday morning.

Because despite the recent wave of transfers spread across college athletics, Travis’ case proved to be much more complicated.

Initially, there were three things working against him:

Travis intended to transfer from one ACC school (Louisville) to another (Florida State). ACC rules preclude an undergraduate student-athlete from transferring directly within the conference without penalty. That penalty requires the student-athlete to sit out one year and also lose a year of eligibility. (In Travis’ case, he would’ve lost his redshirt freshman year and been considered a redshirt sophomore by the time he became eligible to play for FSU in 2020.)

Travis was also bound by an additional ACC rule that requires student-athletes who sign a National Letter of Intent (NLI) to an ACC school to be in residence at that school for at least one year. Travis signed an NLI with Louisville in February 2018, and leaving after less than a year would place him in violation of the terms of that NLI. The penalty for that violation is the same as for the first rule (sit a year, lose a year), and although the league does not double the penalty, it does require two separate waivers in order for a student-athlete to be released from them.

Finally, Travis was subject to the standard NCAA rule that requires undergraduate student-athletes to sit out a year when transferring between bowl subdivision schools.

So if Travis was to be eligible for 2019-20, he and Florida State would need to receive three separate waivers – two from the ACC and one from the NCAA.

That alone was enough to make Travis’ case complicated, and things were about to get even trickier.

Because while FSU’s compliance office was determining the best strategy to make Travis’ case, the ACC was also considering changes to its intraconference transfer rules in light of the recently created NCAA transfer portal.

After lengthy discussions at the conference level, the ACC in mid-February decided to eliminate its NLI transfer rule but to retain its intraconference transfer rule.

OK, so that’s one waiver down, two to go.

Good news, but Travis still had a long way to go.

It was right around this time FSU made a calculated decision, albeit one that might have slowed the timeline a little bit: It decided to actively engage the athletics department at Louisville before submitting the waiver application to the NCAA.

This was done for a good reason. NCAA rules state that former schools named in a waiver request must be given a chance to review the facts and assertions that the applying school submits. The NCAA receives and considers those reviews before making a ruling.

Florida State could’ve skipped that part and submitted its request more quickly. But had Louisville then disputed Travis’ case, the process might have devolved into a back-and-forth affair between the two schools – with the NCAA acting as an intermediary.

So rather than risk that, FSU got Louisville involved before submitting its case to the NCAA. And it found Louisville to be an active and responsive participant in the proceedings.

(An important note: Although Louisville had a football coaching change following the 2018 season, that was not the basis for Travis’ appeal and was not considered by the NCAA or ACC in making their rulings.)

The process took a few weeks, but Louisville and Florida State worked cooperatively together, and, in mid-April, FSU officially submitted Travis’ waiver request to the NCAA.