1983 Cotton Bowl wrote:FSU is exhausting. I can just imagine the BIG and SEC looking at all their antics and saying, "no thanks". They've made so many enemies.
That is a good way to label FSU. It grows from the massive inferiority complex. FSU was originally the state U for girls. It only became coed because of WW2. So UF is both flagship and land grant and until Bobby Bowden had nearly 100% of the college sports fan attention in FL that was not located near Miami (Miami played in the Orange Bowl, maybe twice, before FSU ever had a single male student). And FSU grew largely by getting the children of new Floridians to go there. The kids from more established FL families went to UF and the newcomers and the children of those whose families had never before gone to college went to FSU. So in state U teams, UF was elite socially while FSU was nothing. To put it in TX terms, UF was UT, while FSU was Houston.
ACC membership began a massive change for FSU in those things. Rather quickly, it began drawing a larger number of top students and more professors from top PhD programs. It was able to win at state politics and get more funding for various academic areas. Its academic rankings began to rise. The bad thing from all that was that many FSU people began to think that they then had arrived fully and should be bowed to in all things. But FSU will always be silly, sad little brother to UF. No conference membership or TV money can change that. In fact, as TAMU will relearn, the worst thing for a long belittled brother school that greatly values sports successes to do is be in the same athletics conference with the super arrogant and dismissive Big Brother. The sad, silly little brother status is then always reinforced at every turn.
Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2024 11:25 am