The state of the State of Florida

The history of college football spans nearly 150 years, but the state of Florida didn’t do much for that first century. Then, like its ubiquitous condo developments, the Sunshine State cropped up overnight and changed the landscape of the sport. And in the past 35 years, the constant churn of talent, money, and in-state rivalries has given rise to some of the most reliably gaudy football ever played.

Out of a swampland uninhabitable before air conditioning, Florida made itself a college football fixture. Since 1983, five teams have won their first national titles — consensus, BCS, or Playoff — and three of them were Florida State, Florida, and Miami. Those so-called Big Three schools dominated college football, winning 11 national titles in 31 years. Sure, Texas and California high schools produce comparable talent, yet neither state can claim as many FBS schools that have won multiple championships in the modern era.

In 2018, the state of Florida is still evolving. The Canes, Noles, and Gators were the first three programs to capitalize on Florida’s high school talent windfall; lately, the four other FBS schools in Florida — UCF, USF, FAU, and FIU — have made it the most competitive state in the country. The underclass wellspring culminated in UCF going 13-0 last season and claiming a national championship. USF went 10-2, and FAU and FIU had outstanding seasons by their standards, as well.

The Big Three will always have power conference cachet, but Florida State and Florida are in transition. Miami emerged only last season from a decade-plus in the doldrums. Meanwhile, those “second tier” Florida schools are becoming more attractive to local recruits, and schools from all over the country are ever eager to take all that talent out of state.

It feels like Florida is at an inflection point, something that the seven current FBS head coaches in the state are uniquely suited to explain. They are:

• Butch Davis, FIU (former Miami assistant and head coach)
• Josh Heupel, UCF
• Lane Kiffin, FAU
• Dan Mullen, Florida (former Florida offensive coordinator)
• Mark Richt, Miami (former Miami quarterback and Florida State OC)
• Charlie Strong, USF (former Florida assistant across four different stints)
• Willie Taggart, Florida State (former Manatee High School QB and USF head coach)

All seven spoke with SB Nation about the Sunshine State’s rise, as well as its future. Among five of them, they combine for more than 50 years of coaching experience in Florida.

This is the story of the state, as told by its current stewards.

Part 1: Establishing the State of Florida by establishing the State of Miami

The Canes hired Howard Schnellenberger — a two-time assistant for the Dolphins, and offensive coordinator of the undefeated 1972 team — in 1979. He inherited several future pros and also a backup quarterback playing close to home — Mark Richt of Boca Raton — from Lou Saban, who’d coached Miami to just its second winning season in 11 years. Saban would also coach UCF for two seasons in the ‘80s.

Butch Davis: I’ve said this dozens of times to a lot of people. The one guy that doesn’t get a lot of credit for the resurrection and the building of the Miami program: Lou Saban. People don’t realize that when Howard took the job — Lou didn’t get much credit for it — [Schnellenberger] did have guys like Jim Kelly.

Schnellenberger began a trend at Miami: he inherited talent, further upgraded the roster, and made success seem inevitable.

Mark Richt: [Schnellenberger] knew the tri-county area — Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties — was so full of great players that he considered those three counties the State of Miami. He recruited it as if it was a state unto itself, along with the state of Florida.

And he was very bold in where he felt like we were going, and we were dumb enough to believe him. He would always say that “we’re on a collision course for a national championship, and the only variable is time.”

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Richt’s coaching is faith-based, just like his former mentor Bobby Bowden, who Richt coached under for a decade. Though last year’s Miami team became known for a turnover chain that could have been in a 2 Live Crew video, the Canes are much cleaner than the renegade bunch who put the state on the map under Schnellenberger, Jimmy Johnson, Dennis Erickson, and Davis. Even someone as famously buttoned up as Richt remembers getting into mischief while playing for the Canes.

Richt: We got in trouble one time, me and some of the guys in my apartment. I’m not gonna say what we did, but they used to do room inspections, and every once in a while Coach Schnellenberger would come by, and he caught us having something we shouldn’t have had and wondered where in the heck we got it, and scared the heck out of us.

In 1983, after winning the state’s first national title, Schnelly left for the pros. His exit would set another precedent, as the next three Canes coaches would win titles and then jump to the NFL, starting with Jimmy Johnson.

Davis: Jimmy called, and he said, ‘Hey, I’d love for you to come down here [to Miami]. Would you be interested?’ And I said, ‘God yes, I’ll get on the plane first thing in the morning.’

I was fortunate enough to be the only coach that Jimmy initially was able to hire [Johnson retained all of Schnellenberger’s staff, until one coach retired]. It completely, dynamically changed all the fortune for me, being a part of Jimmy’s staff for 15 years and being exposed to coaching in Miami with elite athletes.

Davis says when he came back as head coach in 1995, after a stint with Johnson on the Cowboys, the roster was full with “40 percent” out-of-state kids, hailing from as far away as Canada. Miami had lost five games over its last two seasons under Dennis Erickson, more than it’d lost from 1987 through 1992 combined.

Davis: The weather is so good that kids are active all year round. I’m talking about youth kids. I’m talking about five-, six-, seven-, eight-year-old kids. They’re outside all the time, playing sports, playing pickup basketball.

I remember that first year I was in Miami in 1984, I’m driving on I-95 and going through downtown Miami, and you can see, at like midnight, park lights were on. All over the whole city, there’s park lights on and kids are playing baseball, kids are playing basketball, they’re out playing soccer. So they’re playing all the time. I think that that unbelievably sets a precedent for the type of athleticism that is developed in the state of Florida.

I think the roots clearly were because of how much the state focused on recruiting Florida kids. If I would say that there’s ever been any time when guys have made mistakes, is when they’ve gone out and they kinda get the [national recruiting] idea.

When Davis left for the Browns in 2000, Miami had come within a five-point loss to Washington and a BCS computer away from a shot at another national title. FSU went to the title game that year instead, even though the Noles had lost to the Canes.

It’s easy to draw a parallel between Davis and Richt coming off of Miami’s 10-3 2017 season. Like Davis, Richt came back to find a roster filled with out-of-state talent (Richt predecessor Al Golden had a New Jersey pipeline) and recent NCAA trouble. Davis’ Miami served out a bowl ban in his first year. Richt took over three years removed from two bowl bans and the Nevin Shapiro scandal.

Both showed Miami can turn around quickly if you stick to script.

Richt: I’m not gonna sit here and say we’ll be better than those teams of the past, because you can’t be better than those teams. That’s a tall statement to say we’re gonna be better than the best team in the history of Miami. But I will say that if we can be as good as they were, we’ll be at the top of the college football world.

Teams that have won in the past can win again. If you do things the right way, you’ll have the success that you need, and hopefully we’ll do it in such a way that everyone will take pride in it. So far, so good.

Part 2: Florida State, “America’s team”

Until Jimbo Fisher ran out of goodwill and cashed in at Texas A&M, Florida State had been a stable program. Bobby Bowden had coached at FSU from 1976 to 2009.

Bowden ran out of goodwill, too. From 2001 to 2009, the Noles finished unranked and with six losses three times. But Bowden accomplished a lot before then: FSU had 14 straight top-five AP finishes, two Heisman winners, two national championships, and nine ACC titles under his watch.

New coach Willie Taggart looks to channel the Bowden bullies he grew up rooting for as a kid in Bradenton, Florida — the ones who did battle with Miami and then the Gators in epic games throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Willie Taggart: I’m going to show our guys the movie The Bowden Dynasty throughout training camp. So they can understand the impact of Deion Sanders, of the guys who came before. Warrick Dunn. Charlie Ward. They’ve seen these guys, talked to them, but they haven’t seen them play. They haven’t seen the plays they made. They haven’t seen all those games, all those years of winning at that high of a level. Sometimes you take it for granted, but a lot of them weren’t even born yet.

Being a part of the Bowden-era Seminoles was a fantasy for both Richt and Taggart.

Richt: Coach Bowden allowed me to be the quarterbacks coach as a graduate assistant. That was very unique, and I didn’t even realize how unique it was until years down the road.

Working for Coach Bowden was an unbelievable opportunity. All of us felt that way. I know I did, as a young coach coming into the profession, and being under Coach Bowden was like a dream come true.

Taggart: You get the sense, going on the booster tours [throughout the state], that all of them appreciate you wanting to be there. To me, that’s what I grew up on, though. That was your team. Florida State was my team. I was a fan. There’s ownership of that.

I had never been to campus, but that was my team, and no one was going to tell me different.

Unlike the rival Gators, who would not play an out-of-state regular-season game outside SEC play from 1991 to 2017, the Noles built their brand by going national. Games with Nebraska, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Auburn, and LSU were the norm. Winning was the norm, too.

Richt: We were playing football at the highest level, and we were winning ACC championships and national championships. We played in [four national championship games in five years], so the success was really unprecedented. I guess it was the ‘90s or one of those decades, it was more victories than anyone in the United States of America. So it was a golden time.

Taggart: [Fans] want to feel like they are a part of the team. And you can sense that they feel like they can be a part of it again. You’ve got to let them in a little bit and let them have a piece of it. I think the spring game showed that. And yes, they want someone who wants to be here. It’s important to them. You can tell. Remember: three coaches in 40 years.

Despite a slight comedown from the program’s recent title under Fisher, Taggart still believes Florida State is as cool now as it was for him as a child.

Taggart: Yes. It is. Absolutely. Especially in the state of Florida. I think that’s largely due to how [recruits’] parents grew up, loving Florida State during that time, the heyday of Bobby Bowden. Then you combine that with the recent success the program had, on top of what Coach Bowden did.

I think Florida State is a national brand. I think you tune in and watch Florida State on Saturday the way people watch the Cowboys, honestly. They’re America’s team.

Part 3: The Gators and identity

Dan Mullen understands the expectations he faces as Florida’s head coach, particularly his fanbase’s thirst for offense. He was the offensive coordinator of two championship teams, led by a larger-than-football quarterback in Tim Tebow and former head coach Urban Meyer. Since they left, the Gators haven’t finished higher than 83rd in total offense.

The Gators’ addiction is Steve Spurrier’s doing. He won the program’s first Heisman in 1966, then engineered some of the most prolific offenses in college football as UF head coach from 1990 to 2001.

If any school in the state has something that resembles old-money clout, it’s Florida. The Gators are a charter member of the SEC and have been fielding teams for more than 100 years. Despite that, they didn’t win much in the black-and-white era.

Charlie Strong: I think that when Coach took over in the ‘90s, everybody felt like that was the program in the state that had everything, but it was just getting over the hump and being a consistent winner. [Strong coached under every Gators coach from 1983 to 2009.] We’d won some games with Charley Pell. Then when Galen Hall took over, he probably lost one or two games his first two years. So it was always: we’ve not won a Southeastern championship.

The now semi-retired Head Ball Coach has an office in Florida’s stadium, with his name on the field in two places and a statue alongside Tebow’s. The shadow of Spurrier looms large, and not just in Gainesville.

Lane Kiffin: I grew up a Florida Gators fan. That was a Spurrier thing. I just liked the colors of their uniforms and the style they played, and how he coached and how wide open their offense was.

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Josh Heupel: I’ve gotten to know Coach Spurrier through the years as a player and a coach. His son, Steve Spurrier Jr., was on our staff at Oklahoma. Friend of mine. He’s one of the most creative and innovative minds — at Florida, offensively, he was ahead of his time. Some of those concepts are things that we ran [at Oklahoma, under former Spurrier assistant Bob Stoops].

But Florida is the latest Big Three school to show that success is not a mandate, no matter how near the talent is. In 2010, with Florida State in transition and Miami flailing, the Gators would have played for a second straight national title if not for Alabama. Over the next eight years, Florida State reasserted itself with the only championship in the state that current recruits remember, and Miami has come much closer to being “back” than the Gators have.

Dan Mullen: I embrace [high expectations for offense at Florida] just because I know it. That’s how Florida Gator fans expect to win. But if you’ve heard me talk all spring, I’m always talking about: We’re going to do what we need to do to win games. I love scoring points. I want to put points on the board, but we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.

Back in 2005, the Florida brand was sold by winning only, which is still today the best way to sell a brand.

Hiring one of your own can be as risky as hiring an outsider. Ron Zook had spent five years at Florida under Spurrier, yet failed. Meyer had no connections, yet won. After two failed outsiders following Meyer, Florida went back to what it knows, both philosophically and personally; Athletic Director Scott Stricklin worked with Mullen at Mississippi State.

Strong: Dan’s an excellent coach. You look at the job he did there as an offensive coordinator, then what he did at Mississippi State. The good thing about Dan is that he had coached at the University of Florida, so he’s gonna be successful there because he knows it.

Mullen: Our whole key is: Get everybody on the same page and get everybody headed in the right direction. When you do this, it’s easy to establish what the identity is.

Part 4: The rise and fall of Florida football through rivalries, including upstarts UCF and USF

From 1987 to 1993, Florida State and Miami entered every one of their matchups in the top 10. From 1990 to 2000, every Florida-Florida State game featured two top-10 teams, and six times the winner ended up playing for the national championship, including in 1996, when the two rematched in the Sugar Bowl that saw the Gators win their first title. The Gators and Canes have only played six times since 1987, and though the two will meet in Orlando in 2019, Florida will always be regarded as ducking the Canes.

Taggart: Growing up, you had to choose. Every family, everyone in our neighborhood. I can’t remember it being any other way. You were a Florida State family or you were Miami. Everyone had a reason. We were always Florida State. No choice.

But the Big Three rivalries have recently lacked drama and stakes. Gone are the days when a field goal missed wide right decided whether Miami or Florida State played for the championship. Florida has lost seven of its last eight against Florida State after dominating the end of Bowden’s tenure. And Miami’s recent struggles were punctuated by seven straight losses to the Seminoles. From 2010-2016, Miami had a .727 winning percentage before its October game with the Noles, and a .444 winning percentage after losing it.

Richt: It happened prior to us being here. The first time we played [Florida State], we lost [in 2016], actually getting ready to kick an extra point to tie it and get it to overtime and get the extra point blocked. And then we did lose three games after that. The good news is, we got the victory last year and didn’t have the meltdown.

The best regular season game of 2017 was also a rivalry weekend game in Florida. However, it didn’t take place in Gainesville, Tallahassee, or Miami. It was in Orlando between UCF and USF, two teams that have been playing in FBS for 22 and 17 years, respectively. UCF won a scorcher to cap an undefeated regular season.

Strong: You want to make sure that each and every year, that’s a big game, just like Florida-Florida State, just like Florida State-Miami. Those games become rivalry games because you’re within state, and all these guys, they grew up together. Some of ‘em are from the same hometown and went to different schools. So you get that buildup.

While 2017’s game between USF and UCF was a classic, it was the 2016 game, a USF win, that injected the series with even more bad blood. Taggart’s Bulls scored a garbage time touchdown to win by 17. At the time, Taggart told SB Nation: “Scott [Frost] told me after the game he respected our team, but he’d remember that last touchdown. I told him, ‘Me too. I’ll remember it.’”

The I-4 siblings are for real, and not just within the Group of 5 — just ask Auburn. The blueblood Tigers have lost their last game against each. USF and UCF both show the depth of talent in the state of Florida, and how quickly teams can win in the state. It took USF just 11 seasons to blaze to No. 2 in the country in a wacky 2007. But ascendancy isn’t something to take for granted.

Taggart: All I can say is, some people assume things will happen just because they’re there. I knew things were going to be tough at my first press conference when someone said, “Coach, we can’t wait to get back to No. 2 again!”

I’m like, you were No. 2 for a week. The program had a lot of success, but when they got there, they didn’t know what to do with it or where to go. They had no plan.

Strong: When I was [in Gainesville], I’d come down to USF to go see [former Bulls coach Jim] Leavitt. But it was just amazing to see how fast he built it, because when he started there were offices in a trailer.

There was so many good players in the state, and so everybody looked at how quickly he did it at South Florida. And that’s when the recruiting really got heavy in the state then, because you could take a program and get it going that fast, with the number of players that he recruited from the state of Florida.

UCF had a similarly quick build, achieving a 12-1 record and Fiesta Bowl win in 2013, 17 years after joining FBS. Then the 2017 Knights claimed a national championship.

Heupel: I think student-athletes, and people across America, recognize that this program went undefeated and beat the team that beat the two teams that played for the national championship in the CFP.

Kiffin: I don’t think that, from a national perspective, people really think about them as national champions, whether that’s right or wrong. I just think that would be the bowl — that’s what normal fans can say: Whoever won the Playoff is the champion.

We’re never gonna worry about other lobbying or who votes for this. Then you’re losing your focus on what matters, which is just playing that week. [That includes lobbying via Twitter, although Kiffin admits he may do so jokingly if his team makes a run.]

This is the plight of the mid-majors in Florida: a constant fight for legitimacy both inside the state and out. UCF, USF, FAU, and FIU have to contend with being Group of 5 teams, but also being in the shadow of three recent national powers.

Strong: What’s really great is that we’ve yet to win a conference championship. So everything we’re doing now is that we gotta win a conference championship. It’s continuing to build, and you’re right, with me being the fourth coach in school history, you just know there’s so much that’s gotta get done. The foundation is there, now we’ve gotta continue to build.

Heupel: Five 10-win seasons in the last 10 years puts you in the top 15 in America, as far as those wins. Three conference championships in five, two New Year’s Six bowl wins in five years — those are gonna put you in the top five in America. It’s a special thing, what’s going on at UCF right now.

Part 5: FIU, FAU, and starting somewhere

Davis: We had a motto last year of “why not us,” and the whole idea is: Why can’t FIU do what Northern Illinois has done, what UCF has done, what a lot of other schools have done, and go 13-0?

FIU (in Miami) and FAU (in Boca Raton) will always have to fight the fact that the Canes are the big dog south of I-4. That means many of the students at FAU and FIU have ingrained allegiance to The U.

FIU opened its doors in 1972 and started playing football in 2002, the same year the Canes nearly won their sixth national title. The University of Miami is a private school about one-fifth the size of FIU, yet it dwarfs the Panthers in cultural influence, thanks to football. Because of the way the Canes emerged in the ‘80s — with homegrown talent, a swagger that is deeply Miami, and huge wins — they have a special bond to the event city. That’s what Davis is up against as he tries to build FIU.

Davis: Just speaking with the board of trustees and some of the people on the board of governors, I think that they really realize that a lot of [FIU students] maybe graduated from the University of Miami, but they may have got their law degree or their medical degree or their masters at FIU, or vice versa. They see what the football program has meant to the University of Miami; they would like the same thing at FIU.

I think there is a quarter of a million [FIU] alumni in Dade and Broward counties. There’s 50,000-plus students at FIU.

In 2005, the then-Golden Panthers became the fastest program to ever jump from FCS to FBS after starting a football program because their application technically beat out FAU’s.

FIU reached two bowl games under Miami-born and Canes-bred Mario Cristobal in 2010 and 2011 before firing him after one backsliding season. The Panthers returned to a bowl in 2017 under a different Miami architect: Davis.

Davis: There’s several generations of people that graduated from FIU when FIU didn’t have a football program. So their allegiance — they’re season ticket holders and Hurricane fans. So, obviously, the challenge is to try and flip some of those back. Then to make sure the ones that are graduating over the last six, seven, eight years, that there’s been a football program to make sure they’re interested in the program. It’s not gonna happen overnight.

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Kiffin’s FAU, meanwhile, just went 11-3, ripping off nine straight wins to end the season. That certainly made the stoic Schnellenberger smile — the State of Miami founder was also the Owls’ first head coach. Also like Schnelly, there’s a chance Kiffin’s head will be turned by a greater opportunity, despite a new 10-year deal.

No program in Florida has much continuity right now. Richt is the longest-tenured, and he’s heading into his third season.

Kiffin: Nowadays, you don’t get to ride a rough season unless you have an extended amount of success. I think you see coaches reach more and make more short-term decisions in hirings, in personnel or recruiting or grad transfers, because they’re so focused on right now versus the long-term of the program.

Mullen: I think the key is you separate the two … That’s goal No. 1, is making sure we build a successful football program. Goal No. 2 is winning with this year’s team. Most of the things and a lot of the decisions we make, I try to separate the two, so there’s not always crossover. Obviously winning with this year’s team will help the program long-term, but there’s a lot of other things we’re gonna do to make sure we’re adding stability.

Something like hiring a personnel director can be a difficult decision. Do you hire a new one to institute your recruiting strategy, or do you keep the guy from the previous regime who had crucial relationships in place? Those decisions are even tougher when you have expectations.

Strong: When you have history and tradition, so much is expected. They want that history and tradition to carry on.

Kiffin: [FAU players] are dying for success because they’ve never had it. People around the program, they want the help. They’re not stuck in their ways because they haven’t worked before. Sometimes when you get those other places, you have people around the program — especially donors that don’t really know football, but they think they do — so they say, ‘Why don’t we do this because we used to do this and we’ve won here forever?’

Now, it’s harder to recruit to it, because there’s no history. Those places are a lot easier to recruit to, because their history of winning championships.

Besides his time at Florida, Strong was also head coach at Texas. Kiffin has a pedigree at storied programs like USC, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Kiffin: Some [Group of 5] schools you’d say are similar to us, but you’re up in the Midwest or things like that. You don’t have the ability to get the players on a consistent basis. That’s why I see [FAU] as not a stepping stone job. Everyone starts somewhere. Florida State was an all-girls school at one point.

Part 6: The new battle over one of Florida’s biggest natural resources: recruits

Locking the state down is now virtually impossible. The talent is not the secret it was until the late 1970s, and recruiting budgets elsewhere continue to increase.

For instance, after losing several bowl games to Florida State and Miami, Nebraska got faster by recruiting Florida. The Huskers’ 1992 class included a quarterback, Tommie Frazier from Bradenton, who lit up his home-state Gators in 1995’s title game. Frazier’s high school backup was Taggart.

But is demand outstripping supply? Are some out-of-state programs wasting their time? That’s the self-serving argument that Kiffin and Davis make.

Mullen: You look at the internet, you look at how recruiting works, everybody’s film is out there. It’s hard to find any diamonds in the rough. But, you still find diamonds in the rough through your evaluation, not because no one else has heard of them.

Kiffin: South Florida is, I would actually say, over-recruited. Not just heavily recruited. I think it’s two things: There’s a ton of great players, and coaches want to be here in the spring. They want to recruit South Florida as opposed to being up north.

When I started at USC as an assistant, we had eight coaches split California, and then I had the rest of the country. Coach [Pete] Carroll gave me the rest of the country to go find the top guys. Spent a lot of time in Florida early on. After the first year, we signed Mike Williams from [Tampa], an All-American receiver.

You always gotta be careful of [coaches going to Florida to recruit just to be there]. You get people on staffs that are pushing guys in their area and making them seem better than they are just so they can say, I signed guys in my area. The best staffs realize that, hey, it doesn’t matter who signed who. It’s a we. It’s us. It’s everybody together.

A lot of times you’ll see assistant coaches overhype their guys in their area for selfish reasons.

Davis: Somebody told me that there were over 500 kids in the state of Florida that signed Division I football scholarships last year. There’s not 500 kids in this state, I think, that probably are Division I. I think a lot of guys come down here, and they recruit — and they spend six months, eight months, 10 months recruiting — and they feel like, well, I gotta sign somebody, and you’re like, I don’t know why they’re signing those guys.

Kiffin: There’s some reaches. I think people reach for kids down here because, if I get one, I can recruit that school or I can recruit that area if I get a couple, even if they’re not as good as maybe they need to be.

Mullen: There’s so many great players in the state, but I think the fact that everybody comes to recruit Florida — not every school goes and recruits certain states. I grew up in New Hampshire. I played high school football in New Hampshire. Doesn’t mean there’s not great football players, but not everybody’s going to recruit the state of New Hampshire every year. Everybody comes to Florida.

Still, it can be nice to have so many good players in your backyard.

Heupel: It’s a lot different than the other places I’ve been, where I never spent two days consecutively in the same city recruiting. I was in a different airport every single day, flying to some metropolitan city. Here, you’re leaving Monday morning and hitting your first school at 7:30 a.m., then you spend the night at your house. It’s pretty unique.

This is the state of the state in 2018

The championship epicenter might not be in Florida currently, but Tuscaloosa is not far away, and the amount of talent in Florida isn’t waning. Roughly 15 percent of all four- and five-star players on the 247Sports Composite are from Florida as of mid-August.

Power can shift at a moment’s notice, and harnessing Florida’s talent pool is a key to supremacy in the future.

This season won’t determine that future, but it will offer a look.

• FSU’s fortunes may swing wildly from 2017, with the talent at Taggart’s disposal. FSU is fourth in rolling two-year and five-year recruiting rankings.
• Florida might show actual proof of concept on offense, with better skill talent on paper than it has had since the Meyer days, and a Charmin-soft schedule.
• If Miami’s close-game luck swings the other direction, the team could collapse against FSU again. Or the Canes could make another Orange Bowl run.
• Predicting another 12-0 season would be a stretch for UCF, but another conference title and maybe even a New Year’s Six bowl berth? That’s well within the realm of possibility.
• USF is expected to take a step back, with the loss of some key talent, but Strong has maximized a non-blueblood program’s potential before — ask Louisville.
• FIU must land another bowl berth. (Upsetting rival FAU along the way would track with recent history. There hasn’t been a repeat winner in the Shula Bowl since 2012.)
• And if FAU somehow runs through its schedule undefeated (beating Oklahoma and UCF in the process), the Owls might have a better Playoff argument than UCF did.

Mullen: You look through the ‘80s and ‘90s and early 2000s, there’s been times when all three schools were on top of their games. I imagine we can all be on top at the same time again.

Heupel: [It’s a] talent-rich state that provides some of the greatest players in the history of the game and currently as well. Having recruited the state, different places I’ve been, there’s great players here year in and year out that are hungry and competitive.

Richt: There was a heyday in there when everybody was in a different league — Florida State in the ACC, Miami in the Big East, and Florida always in the Southeastern Conference — and all three of those teams were hitting on all cylinders in a lot of ways. One of those three, it seemed like, was going to end up in the national championship game, for maybe a 10-year period.

But since that time, we know Central Florida and South Florida have done great things, and Florida International and Florida Atlantic are starting to grow. And there’s other schools throughout the state that are growing. There’s a lot of great football in this state, everybody knows that — I’m talking about high school football — and there’s a lot of great recruits, and a lot of really good places for kids to stay in-state.

The future of the state of Florida may be uncertain, but there’s no question that the state of Florida is strong.

And as long as the state remains a font of talent, it will hold unusual sway over college football. A Florida school might not be winning a national title every third year like the not-so-distant old days, but the state is just as vibrant and evolving as it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s — perhaps more so because of the success of UCF, USF, FAU, and FIU. Whatever the next iteration of the state looks like — and the many iterations after that — Florida football is too important and unique not to pay rapt attention.