Florida State is slated to face Southern Miss in the Independence Bowl on Dec. 27. The Seminoles had a disastrous season, but their 6-6 record — gotten via a rescheduled game against ULM after Jimbo Fisher had already left for Texas A&M — qualified them. It extended their bowl streak to a record 36 years, though the NCAA’s record books didn’t view it that way.
Florida State defies internet detectives and says that it is in fact bowl eligible in a statement
The Noles were still going to play in the Independence Bowl regardless.
Photo by Rob Foldy/Getty Images
And now the NCAA might have another issue with FSU’s bowl streak.
Reddit’s college football page, r/CFB, presented data Thursday that calls into question whether Florida State is actually eligible for a bowl game. Let’s go through it.
FBS teams get to count one FCS win toward bowl eligibility.
The Noles were 5-6 against FBS opposition, but they also had a blowout win of Delaware State, a 2-9 FCS team from the MEAC.
That FCS win has to meet a seldom-cited requirement to count toward a bowl.
It has to come against a team that has used at least 90 percent of the FCS maximum scholarship total (63 per team) “during a rolling two-year period.”
I can’t think of a time this rule has been used to invalidate an FCS win [update: a commenter points out it happened to USF in 2003]. There are a few 6-6 teams every year that have beaten FCS teams, though.
Under this rule, it appeared Delaware State shouldn’t have counted toward FSU’s eligibility.
Reddit went to Delaware State and got the numbers, finding it came up barely short.
SB Nation reached out to various DSU officials to attempt to confirm those numbers but didn’t hear anything back. FSU and the Independence Bowl declined comment to the Tampa Bay Times.
Thursday night, reporter Brett McMurphy confirmed the game will go on despite a “monumental error that should have been caught at three levels: the school, conference and NCAA.”
But wait! Friday night, FSU clarified that it is actually bowl eligible after all.
The Noles say that Delaware State told them that everything was kosher, and it was actually a matter of internet sleuths not accounting for the way scholarships are allocated.
Should this even matter anyway, though?
And thus a very strange season for FSU somehow gets even stranger.
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