What you are about to read is not a prediction that Willie Taggart will someday be a better football coach at Florida State than Jimbo Fisher, it is merely a statement of fact that he is already a much better fit.
You could just sense it from the day he stepped on campus for the first time as head coach and exuberantly started performing the tomahawk chop — a goodwill gesture I can't recall Jimbo ever enthusiastically executing during his decade in Tallahassee, Fla.
"It just felt right to do the chop," Taggart told me in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon. "And while I was doing it, it was like, 'Man, you're finally here.' "
This is why Taggart gets a hall pass on being a one-and-doner at Oregon. Just call it the college football version of exempting the dreamers. You can get away with leaving a head-coaching job after only one season as long as you're in hot pursuit of your boyhood dream. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out this would probably be the only time in Taggart's professional life that he'd have a chance to coach the program he grew up idolizing.
"In the last 40 years, there have only been two head coaches (at FSU)," Taggart says. "You just don't know if it's going to come open again. It was never my intention to leave Oregon after one year, but it's like I tell my kids and my players: 'When you're chasing your dream, you better be ready when the opportunity comes.' If it wasn't Florida State, I wouldn't have left Oregon. It was a tough decision to leave, but it would have been even tougher if I had stayed and had to live with the regrets."
I know, I know ... disingenuous college coaches always claim that their next job is their dream job, but Taggart actually has the moments, the mementos and the memories to prove it.
You can still hear excitement in his voice when describes playing sandlot football in his hometown of Palmetto and pretending to be his FSU heroes. "I'd go get a Sharpie and write a big No. 2 on my little white T-shirt and go out in the neighborhood and play ball as if I was Deion (Sanders). Or sometimes I was Charlie (Ward).
"But," he laughs, "I was never Derrick Brooks because I always wanted the ball in my hands."
Or you can still here the annoyance in his voice when he talks about the infamous "Wide Rights" against Miami. "It drove me crazy," he says. "I still get ticked off when I think about it!"
Or you can still here the reverence in his tone when he talks about the iconic Bobby Bowden. In fact, Taggart called the FSU legend when he first took the job just to let Bowden know how much he still means to the university.
"I just wanted him to realize that he's always welcome in this program and we're going to make him proud," Taggart said. "I've always had so much respect for him. I want to make sure we get back to those days and those ways when he was the head coach here. And, hopefully, I can stay here as long as he did."
This is why Florida State fans are so enamored with Taggart. Even though he didn't go to FSU (because Bowden didn't offer him a scholarship and he ended up playing at Western Kentucky), he bleeds Garnet and Gold. The biggest Seminole fan I know — my buddy Rick Camarata — texted me this other day, "Coach Taggart says his offensive philosophy is 'lethal simplicity.' In barely 90 days, he's shown the way he feels about Florida State is 'lethal sincerity.'"
Jimbo won a national championship at FSU and is no doubt a phenomenal football coach, but did you ever get the idea that he truly loved Florida State? If he had, he wouldn't have bailed on the program after one of the worst seasons in modern history and left a trail of hard feelings behind him. While Taggart chased his ultimate dream and wound up in Tallahassee, Jimbo chased the ultimate paycheck and wound up at Texas A&M.
Jimbo now feels like Florida State's version of former Florida coach Urban Meyer. Both enjoyed tremendous success in Tallahassee and Gainesville, but, in hindsight, both seem more like coaching mercenaries than luminaries.
"I hear a lot of negative things, but Jimbo did a lot of great things around here, too," Taggart points out. "He won a lot of ballgames and made a lot of people proud to be 'Noles ... And I was one of them!"
This is the best part of all for Florida State fans.
Willie Taggart is not just the new coach of the team; he is a lifelong fan of the team.
His blood runs garnet.
His heart is made of gold.
About the Author
