AP TOP 25 TAKEAWAYS

FSU’s Taggart already in a bind

Willie Taggart’s tenure at Florida State has started so poorly the new Seminoles coach already is facing something of a crisis. Florida State has not merely lost two of its first three games in Year 1 for Taggart. The Seminoles have scored a total of 10 points in a couple lopsided ACC losses and needed a fourth-quarter comeback to beat FCS school Samford in between.

Florida State was hideous, disorganized and pushed around at Syracuse. That’s a Syracuse program coming off four consecutive losing seasons and with no victories against the Seminoles since it joined the ACC in 2013.

Florida State started the season ranked 19th. The narrative was its 7-6 record last season was an aberration and Jimbo Fisher left enough players behind for Taggart to get the Seminoles to eight or nine wins this season. Wrong.

Either Fisher did a bad job of recruiting and developing, or Taggart is doing a bad job of coaching. Probably a little bit of both.

Deep breath, Noles fans. This all could turn out just fine. The fear at Florida State, if you’re Taggart, is the tenure gets off to such a bad start that it gets swallowed up by negativity. This happened to Rich Rodriguez at Michigan and Charlie Strong at Texas. That’s not excusing those coaches for having losing records at two of the winningest programs in history, but both made terrible first impressions, lost the faith of many fans early and never were able to change the perception and trajectory of the teams.

Bad starts by notable new coaches ranked from worst to less worse:

1. Kevin Sumlin, Arizona

2. Taggart

3. Chad Morris, Arkansas

4. Dan Mullen, Florida

5. Chip Kelly, UCLA

6. Scott Frost, Nebraska

— Ralph D. Russo, AP