Willie Taggart and Justin Fuente are Florida State’s top 2 targets to replace Jimbo Fisher

Jimbo Fisher is leaving Florida State’s head coaching job to take the same one at Texas A&M. FSU’s top two candidates to replace Fisher are current Power 5 head coaches, according to Tomahawk Nation: Oregon’s Willie Taggart and Virginia Tech’s Justin Fuente. This is comfortably the best open head coaching job in college football.

Either would be a strong hire. Both have turned in encouraging results in their first year (or two years, in Fuente’s case) as Power 5 head men. Before that, both built up excellent mid-majors and established themselves as good offensive minds who could also recruit and develop talent. There’s no reason for Noles fans to despair, basically.

He’s 41.

He’s from South Florida, which is hours south out of Tallahassee but might be the single most talented football region in the country.

He used to be the coach at WKU, where he went 16-20 from 2010-12. But that included a 2-10 mark in his first year, and Taggart posted back-to-back 7-5 seasons before USF hired him away before 2013. He steadily built the Bulls up from there, posting win totals (in order) of two, four, eight, and 10. Taggart put in place the foundations for the Charlie Strong Bulls team that came close to an AAC title this season.

He played QB at WKU and was an assistant there for a few years at the start of his career. He worked as Jim Harbaugh’s Stanford running backs coach from 2007-09.

Taggart is 7-5 in his first season in Eugene and has put together what’s currently the country’s No. 6 recruiting class (and tops in the Pac-12, despite Taggart having just three years of experience coaching farther west than Kentucky).

One gets the impression that if Taggart were to take a job like FSU’s, he’d recruit at an elite level for years.

He’s also 41.

His background is also on offense. He’s known as a QB developer, having been Andy Dalton’s offensive coordinator at TCU and Paxton Lynch’s head coach at Memphis.

Fuente went 7-17 in his first two years as a head coach, 2012-13 at Memphis. But his team took a huge leap in 2014, and every Fuente-coached team has won either nine or 10 games since then.

He moved from Memphis to Virginia Tech before 2016. He replaced the legendary Frank Beamer and managed to keep Beamer’s longtime defensive coordinator, Bud Foster, on his staff, which has been a huge help. Fuente has demonstrated that he’s good at managing the sometimes difficult politics of the coaching business.

His coaching career has been split between the Midwest and Appalachia, and he doesn’t have the obvious local ties Taggart does. He does know the ACC from his two years leading the Hokies, and he’d probably be a quick recruiting study in the Southeast.

Fuente played QB at Oklahoma in college before transferring to I-AA Murray State.