Brent Pry very disappointed Florida State left out of College Football Playoff

Florida State was snubbed for a spot in the College Football Playoff, despite being an unbeaten Power Five champion. That decision has led to a lot of debate around the sport, including within the ACC. Recently, Virginia Tech head coach Brent Pry shared his thoughts on the decision.

As Pry explained, it was a disappointing move and he thought that the Seminoles were going to be in the Playoff.

“Yeah, very disappointed,” Brent Pry said. “I had Florida State in, very felt strongly about it. Their body of work over the course of the season, some of their marquee wins. My heart goes out to Coach [Mike] Norvell and that group. They had a heck of a year and deserve to be in there.”

For Pry and ACC coaches at schools outside of Florida State, this does have an impact. It shows the reputation of the conference, in particular as far as the depth of talented teams in the conference is concerned. On top of that, Pry doesn’t want to be left out if he is able to rebuild Virginia Tech in the same way Mike Norvell was able to rebuild Florida State.

The video of Florida State learning they would be left out of the Playoff showed Norvell sitting quietly, clearly trying to figure out what he was going to say to his team. Later, he admitted that it was one of the toughest things that he’s experienced.

“I was just hurt for our players to be honest with you. It was one of the tougher moments I’ve had to experience just for all that they’ve done. You talk to a team about responding to adversity, getting up and going to give all that you can, to be able to find a way to win a college football game. Like Coach [Kirby] Smart said, it’s hard. It’s hard to do, especially when you face some of the adversities that we’ve had this year, whether it’s injury or different things to overcome. It’s all part of it,” Norvell said.

“As we tell our team all the time, Your truest identity shows up in times of great adversity. We faced it. They put it on display. So that was really that feeling in the moment.”

Bill Hancock on why Florida State was left out of the Playoff

Bill Hancock, the executive director of the College Football Playoff, explained that one factor that led to Florida State getting snubbed was how stacked things were at the top.

“Every year is so different. Just looking at it from the big picture, we’ve never had a year with eight teams at the top as good as these are, and the five conference champions one through five. We’ve never had it come out that way. My feeling is, it probably was the toughest,” Hancock said.

“I’m gonna sound like a coach and say I need to look at the video. I need to go back and look at the year-by-year narrative that we have. But I’ll just repeat, we have not had a year where we’ve had the top stacked so strongly as we had this year.”