Florida State Got Whomped

Florida State lost to Clemson, 59-10, on Saturday, and that 49-point deficit tied for the worst margin in FSU history. It goes without saying that it was an ass-kicking. But how bad was it? This bad.

More on that guy in a minute. Because the loss was also bad enough for first-year head coach Willie Taggart to suggest some Seminoles players had quit:

“That can’t be tolerated,” Taggart said in his postgame comments. “One thing you can’t do, you can’t quit. You quit, you don’t play. So we’ve got to do a great job of making sure we’ve got the right guys. Didn’t play well at all. That’s on me and our coaches and our players and everybody that’s here, and we’ve got to find a way to get that right.”

The Seminoles are 4-4 overall, 2-4 in the ACC Atlantic, ahead of only Wake Forest and Louisville. Taggart had asked for patience last month, after FSU got thumped by Syracuse. But this rebuild might be a bit harder than he thought.

Now back to the shirtless guy that an ABC television camera caught reading a book when the score was 52-3 during the third quarter. The Athletic’s Tashan Reed ventured out and talked to the dude. Turns out his name is Bruce Thyer, and he’s a professor in FSU’s College of Social Work. Thyer described himself as a die-hard fan who came to the game with his 18-year-old daughter, an FSU sophomore, and four of her friends. The group was sitting in the shade, where the air was cool. But after the daughter and her friends left at halftime, with the Seminoles trailing, 28-0, Thyer decided to work on his tan and to crack open his book, which he told Reed was a mystery novel by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn. The book’s title? Dark Places.