Dan Wolken

USA TODAY Sports

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Roughly a mile down Tennessee Street from where the Florida State football team was practicing for the College Football Playoff last Tuesday afternoon, Shannon Sullivan parked his silver sport-utility vehicle near a typically busy intersection and began pulling plastic tables and boxes of shirts out of the back.

Sometimes, Sullivan brings tents to make the operation look more official, but recent windy days had knocked over about six of them by his estimation. For the rest of this month, or until Florida State's season is over, he'll have to make due with a less elaborate setup. As long as the T-shirts get sold — which has a lot more to do with how Jameis Winston plays in the Rose Bowl than anything else — the lack of a storefront doesn't matter too much.

"My life could have changed dramatically any time this season if we would've lost a game," Sullivan said. "They'd have crucified us with one loss. Those nine games when we were behind or close, that's the most stressful time I've had, and I've been in this business forever in Tallahassee."

For the past 13 months, the numerous off-field controversies surrounding Winston combined with the Seminoles' 29-game winning streak have brought unprecedented and unwelcome scrutiny on this town's relationship with Florida State football.

Inside the so-called "Tallahassee bubble," the steady stream of negative headlines is largely viewed as a manufactured conspiracy to embarrass the program.

"Every time we start to pull it together, they come up with something else," said Darwin Harvey, a lifelong Tallahassee resident who frequently comes to the mall with his wife Debra to people watch while wearing a No. 3 FSU jersey in honor of former quarterback E.J. Manuel.

"It's just to bring us down because this is our second year at the top," Debra said. "They're just trying to discourage the players so they'll lose. It's all garbage."

It's also about to end.

Barring a major surprise, Florida State is one or two games from the end of the Winston era, at which point life in Tallahassee will largely return to normal. Without Winston to fuel the conversation, Florida State is no longer the biggest story or villain in college football — just a very good program that looks more or less like everyone else aiming for a national title.

"It's cool being the bad guy sometimes," linebacker Reggie Northrup said. "It's interesting."

It's also temporary.

Though Winston was not made available for interviews last week, the common belief around the Florida State program is that he will announce his intention to enter the NFL Draft shortly after the season ends.

When that happens, there will public displays of gratitude for his contribution to the program, including a Heisman Trophy and last year's national title. There will also be a large measure of institutional relief at a school where reputations have been sacrificed and patience has been exhausted in the process of putting out Winston-related brushfires.

Even this week, as Florida State heads to Pasadena, Calif., to prepare for a semifinal game against Oregon, time and energy will be spent dealing with questions about the news Sunday that Winston had been cleared in a student code of conduct hearing that took place earlier this month regarding allegations that he sexually assaulted a Floirda State student on Dec. 7, 2012. Winston was never charged with a crime by the State Attorney's Office because of a lack of evidence, but the public nature of the investigation and subsequent incidents of immaturity involving Winston have left Florida State officials weary, hoping to simply get through this season without something else creating a stir.

"You haven't heard about him any more," right tackle Bobby Hart said. "He's staying to himself, staying out of the way."

Still, the polarization remains for now, defining so much of the atmosphere in Tallahassee this season. Sullivan has even found a way to capitalize on it.

With no store and only a small Web presence, his business revolves almost exclusively on Florida State football weekends and other events that bring large crowds downtown. His T-shirts, most of which aren't officially licensed and thus don't use FSU logos, are heavy on snark and catchy phrases such as "Too sexy to be a Gator," which he said got him back into selling merchandise to FSU fans and students after the economic downturn in 2008 knocked him out of the business for awhile.

This year, the week of the game against Notre Dame, Sullivan called his printer with a simple an idea.

"I said, we have to do something about this ESPN (expletive)," Sullivan said. "They're just badmouthing us. By 4 p.m., they printed it and had it to me the next morning."

The result was a garnet-colored T-shirt that says "ESPN can bite me" on the front and "Endless Spin Partisan News" on the back, brilliantly tapping into Florida State fans' paranoia over media coverage of Winston.

"It hit immediately," Sullivan said. "I sold hundreds."

A few weeks later, Sullivan decided to print a "Jameis' Famous Crab Shack" shirt referencing the May incident in which Winston walked out of a local Publix with crab legs he did not pay for, resulting in a citation for shoplifting. Sullivan was unsure how it would be received, but he marketed it on the Facebook pages of various FSU fan club chapters and saw his Web site traffic increase from fewer than 100 hits to more than 3,000.

"I sold 50 in four hours downtown the night before a game and ran out," he said. "Then I sold 100 the next week and 200 the week after that. Not only did people want it, they didn't hate me for selling it."

It's a fragile business, though, particularly for someone like Sullivan who basically operates by word of mouth and spends several hours on most days set up in the parking lot of a drug store near campus, hoping for foot traffic.

"Everyone outside of Tallahassee seems to want the Noles to lose," said Sharon Klink, who bought a shirt for her son, a Miami student. "I resent that. (Winston) is one player."

But he's the one that matters most, and for better or worse, life will be much different around the Florida State program when he's gone.

"When he leaves," Harvey said, "you won't hear no more about (Winston's off-field problems)."

That will be a welcome relief for some and perhaps a problem for others, especially if FSU struggles to maintain its dominance. As much as someone like Sullivan dislikes the controversy as a fan, there's no doubt the confluence of circumstances around Winston have helped his business. It's certainly better than the lost decade before he got to campus when Florida State fell out of national relevance.

"That sucked," Sullivan said. "I was selling sandals back then."​