These are, or should be, some of the finest days of Jimbo Fisher’s professional life, a man standing firmly atop the college football world.

His Florida State Seminoles are defending national champions. They’ve won 23 consecutive games heading into Thursday’s trip to Louisville, perhaps the last major hurdle in the way of a playoff bid. His roster is loaded. Recruits are rolling in. He’s making $4.1 million a year.

After decades climbing the coaching ladder in anonymity, powered by an old West Virginia belief that work wins out over all, he’s now rich and famous and enjoying … not a second of this?

View photos Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher's over-the-top defense of Jameis Winston has rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way. (AP) More

Fisher, 49, looks stressed, sounds, at times, unhinged and carries himself a bit like a nervous woodland creature, head always darting around watching for whatever attack – or player antic – is coming that he couldn’t otherwise anticipate.

He’s known as someone who prepares for everything, but it doesn’t appear he was ready for this: life as America’s most despised coach, leader of what many consider a program that’s become a bad parody of everything wrong with the sport.

Loyalty, especially to his players, is a bedrock principle of his life, but he’s been so clumsy in expressing it, he’s opened himself up for mocking.

“A tremendous kid,” Fisher said last week of his starting running back, Karlos Williams, dismissing as absurd and reckless any media speculation that Williams might be suspended. “A tremendous ambassador.”

Turns out, Williams had been named as an associate of a man convicted in a summer drug deal turned robbery, where the victim identified Williams as the guy who would set up marijuana purchases. The Tallahassee Police Department politely (as is its way, apparently) requested a meeting with Williams, but he didn’t show and lawyered up.

Then hours after Fisher’s testimonial, the TPD was given a potential case of alleged domestic assault by Williams against a pregnant ex-girlfriend. He’s refusing to speak to police about that, too. Florida State has opened a Title IX investigation into it.

Williams will play against Louisville.

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These things, unfortunately, happen. Every coach on every campus – every campus – sleeps lightly in fear of misbehaving players, everything ranging from felonies to frivolity. Yet most are capable of supporting their guy while not crossing the line into absurdity, being an authority figure, not an apologist; caring but not coddling.

Williams has been charged with no crimes, which should be repeated. Calling him a “tremendous kid” and a “tremendous ambassador” is, however, ridiculous to all but the most frenzied of FSU fans.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the only people Fisher is speaking to, perhaps so engulfed in the Tallahassee bubble he’s misreading the image he’s projecting to the public at large about his program and the university attached to it.

This follows a litany of over-the-top comments backing Jameis Winston. It ranges from the tone-deaf declaration that “there is no victim” in an alleged sexual assault that while legally true was just unnecessary and unbecoming. There was his claim that Winston’s never given him a reason to believe he’d ever lie, which made him sound like a naïve parent of a toddler.

View photos Fisher has had a tough time dealing with media scrutiny. (AP) More

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