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Smith, Bud Elliott back again for another episode, the Noel Cast, as always, we will start the podcast by thinking our long-time sponsors, Louisiana Hot Sauce, three simple ingredients, one fantastic product, something that I may even use too much of, but a fantastic product, a great partner for us, and as always, we think our friends a new Iberia, Louisiana, and Bud, we jump into this podcast with the full acknowledgement that we are somewhat in one of the loaves of the calendar where you're

coming off signing day, you're looking towards spring and then projecting towards next year, but still have a decent amount of stuff to talk about, and we'll jump into it and see where this episode takes us.

You know, we are in some loaves, thank God, Coach Morvale, staff came on, I was looking at our download numbers this morning, and we are just about equal right now as what we had been the last two February's, and by my count we still have like 11 days left, so it's gonna be a pretty nice month for the Noel Cast,

and hopefully it's been an entertaining month for the listeners, so we'll also be coming up, we're probably gonna do our review, the freshman draft, we've not forgotten about that.

I think one of us might be a big enough winner to where we don't even need to calculate the special team's snaps, because there's just not enough possible special teams reps to make a difference, and you guys can guess who that winner is, I'm not gonna give it away, and tell all myself there, but yeah, let's go ahead and jump in.

One, two, we have some football talks tonight, we have some recruiting talk, we have a little baseball thought, maybe a little basketball talk, if we want to, the Noel's are obviously playing tonight, and I'm excited about this, so first I wanna lead off with within the last week or so, Bill Connelly, now a VSPN, formerly my colleague at SBA, and still a good friend of mine, put out his SP plus ratings, formerly S&P plus, but obviously, you know, the stock price.

You know, the stock exchange didn't take too kindly, I do that name, and ESPN also put out their own FPI, which I don't think is as good as Bill's metric anger, but they have the Noel's both 26th, 24th, 23rd, around there, depending on what metric are there as you want to look at, but pretty much both metrics have FSU as a top 30 quality team this year, but we're gonna delay the discussion.

Because there is a question later on in our Q&A from our Patreon member, so we'll kind of tackle that a little bit later in a show, I wanted to tease that open up.

I think the thing I want to open really tonight with, though, the true opener, if you will, our friend Brendan Sonone, at Noel's 24-7, put out a piece discussing the offensive line for Spring, and maybe some goals and objectives for it, but what caught my eye was the depth chart for the Spring.

Have you taken a look at this?

Yeah, it's very, it's very sobering, definitely, and one of my favorite information consumption over the last week, as far as a message board, was people responded into some of the videos that have come out to the offensive lineman going through drills, and basically instructed everybody to have a warm shot of that video clip, anytime the brain in your, or the optimism in your brain starts to be a little bit more serious.

And your brain starts to tell you to start thinking about, you know, 9, 10, 11 wins, or whatever else.

It's the real conversation that we've had here for a while is, is separating the immediate, which is a big concern, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it, and also evaluating the long term overall trajectory of the program.

And one, I think we've been pretty unwavering about being concerned about, and two, we're pretty optimistic as to where and, you know, what the program is ultimately headed for, but right now it's going to have to deal with people with the last names of Scott and Mori Smith, and Lord help us of Chaz Niels, a legitimate starter for you.

And there are hurdles here that you cannot get around and are going to be going to be a very tough process to kind of work through this offensive line in general.

Yeah, there are a lot of names here who are either pretty clearly not ready to play at Florida State. Some of them I'm not sure will ever be ready to play at Florida State, and some have already proved that they just do not have the talent and ability to play at Florida State.

And that's not me trying to be a jerk, it's just we've seen enough, right? Like the mic Arnold video, and I'm not trying to dog mic Arnold here because I saw a lot of people doing that and I don't want to do that.

I don't know if that player was hurt or maybe he was just super tired. He's a big guy. Like I don't know when that video was taken. He might have just been extra tired. Now the effort, yeah, it looks really polar. I mean, there's no doubt about it in that video, and you can find that on Twitter.

But here's the thing, if she has not had to rely on mic Arnold to be a starter in well over a year, mic Arnold is not projected in any way to be a starter.

You have several key players out for this year for spring, and mic Arnold is still not projected to even be a spring starter.

Okay, so to me, I'm like, wait, my car is a fifth year senior. If I'm an episode fan out there, I'm not going to waste any of my time talking about mic Arnold tweeting about mic Arnold, whatever, I'm just going to say, hey, man, I hope this kid is on tractor graduate does so in the spring or maybe the summer gets a job, whatever job he can get with the major that he picked.

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