Yet, as the No. 4 Seminoles (6-0), who haven’t lost in 12 games over 12 months, await No. 16 Duke (5-1) and an incoming 79,560, this magic box office number closed which disappeared for this. while from 2015 to 2022 the story is largely told from the perspective of one. He is 32 years old. He is recently married and very happy (20 months). He played baseball at Florida State from 2010 to 2012. He is a coach in the Atlanta Braves organization. He himself reached the heights of the sport.
Yet at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and kickoff, he might not have eaten and he might have cried.
“My weekends,” he says, “are very nerve-wracking. »
For the four years from 2015 to 2018, as his alma mater began to slip away from the throne it had known or at least approached for ages, Devon Travis played second base for the Toronto Blue Jays. He continued the dream that burned every day since childhood until it ended at age 27 with a series of petty injuries. Now he stumbled upon something almost too meaningful to describe: watching his brother, Jordan Travis, nine years younger and also the next child in the family streak, pilot the Seminoles as quarterback during a sixth year of college along a gradual ascension throughout the sequence. path to 13 touchdown passes with one interception during a flawless season.
Meanwhile, older Travis watches and older Travis suffers.
“I’m more nervous for his games than any game I’ve played in,” he says by phone from West Palm Beach, Fla., their hometown. “There are days when I don’t eat before matches. Oh, yeah, man, it’s real.
By kickoff and the season-opening Sunday, Sept. 3, night game in Orlando against LSU, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He didn’t eat in the first quarter, nor the second nor the third. After three quarters with Florida State ahead 24-17 in an eventual 45-24 score, “I finally got up the courage to go get some food,” he recalled. He and his wife, Allison, ventured into the pizza line. He groaned for a long time. They stood for a moment. “I told him, ‘I can’t wait in line. I’m too nervous. » He returned to his place.
Other times, he felt something akin to disbelief as he watched Jordan emerge from the tunnel and enter the Doak. “I’ve cried several times in the stands this year,” he said, “because I see a (small) child who was in the stadium (from 2010 to 2012) and on the other side of the street, at Dick Howser Stadium (the baseball stadium) » watching his older brother play baseball, wearing rather small Seminoles jerseys while their parents only missed one home series the entire time, despite the six daunting hours of driving. “And when I look at my brother, I cry tears of joy because I’m so happy and grateful that he was given this opportunity to put on this uniform and come out of that tunnel in Doak. “
The energy around this race has intensified and markers are abundant. For anyone who hasn’t been to Tallahassee since the 2014 College Football Playoff, it might seem almost like 2014, except for the cannabis dispensaries popping up under the usual row of personal injury lawyer billboards . At the Tallahassee airport, even a football boycott — if you ever find one around here — might be able to tell how well the Seminoles have been doing lately thanks to weekends and jet traffic private and business aircraft.
“Yeah, I mean, especially after being here for so long (23 years), you can kind of get a sense of how the team is performing based on what kind of traffic is coming in and out,” Jim said Durwin, the deputy director of aviation and not a football boycotter. A bigger play like Duke’s carries its allusions, leveraging the talents of jet parkers. “Private planes,” Durwin said, “are going to kind of overflow their normal parking areas.”
“Happy first birthday!” » Ehsan Kassim wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, noting the lack of losses since Oct. 15, 2022, when Florida State fell 34-28 at home to Clemson, drifted to 4-3 and heard from coach third-year Mike Norvell said, “There’s no such thing as a moral victory or anything like that.”
It’s “a waiting place,” Norvell said Wednesday after practice, four seasons after arriving from Memphis to a program that went 152-19-1 from 1987 to 2000 — which will spark some wait – then 26-33 from 2017. until 2021.
“And so you feel the energy,” Norvell said. “I think our fan base and the people around this program have seen growth. There is still a lot of growth to be done and a lot of improvement to be made. But it is a place of waiting. Our expectations of ourselves are to go out there and get better and show the best who we are on and off the field, and I think our guys, you know, have embraced that. I think there’s an enthusiasm around our program and our fan base and everyone associated with our program for what this looks like and trying to reach that standard.
There is now undeniable great hope attached to Homecoming Week on a giant campus with rows of sidewalk tables offering meetups for ROTC, sororities, fraternities, sustainable campus, mental health awareness, a dance marathon, the student union, the Pride Student Union, the Dominican Student Association and so on. In the middle and at the top of it all, “football matters,” as Norvell says. As a Wednesday morning practice began, featuring drills in the indoor facilities, with Waka Flocka Flame et al. blaring from the loudspeakers, nine attendants carefully spaced out in the back of the end zone with crates containing bottles for hydration at the ready.
Today, Jordan Travis, after so much time in college (one year at Louisville, five at Florida State), after so much steady progress and so many Twitter bumps, handles a media session with his placid aplomb. He said, “How are you?” to reporters, “We haven’t reached our potential yet, which is crazy,” and “I love this football team more than anything in the world.” »
His brother called him “a humble, kind, easy-going kid, almost boring, to be honest.” He said: “Without football you could give him a fishing rod and some country music and he’s good for the day. » As for the family, which includes a sister who attends Florida State, “we don’t talk about football with Jordan,” Devon said. They don’t ask, Why did you read that? “It’s forbidden with Jordan. He leaves the stadium and it’s over.
Yet Devon Travis is in a unique position to ponder a perhaps unanswerable topic: How much of Florida State’s new enthusiasm is based on gratitude after a downturn, and how much is negotiated on entitlement after this 152-19-1? Travis sees the former in the stands, of course, and he sees the latter on X, formerly known as Twitter, the hellscape steeped in the art of nitpicking and bullying. “Twitter,” he said, “is a great place for people to follow sports. It’s also a real death trap for people.” He said, “Especially with the Florida State fans, I don’t understand why anyone is upset about the 6-0.”
He was at times shaken by the senseless nastiness directed at his 19, 20, 21 and 22 year old brother. “Twitter probably ate him alive,” he said, a notion the quarterback acknowledged in September in an interview with ESPN’s Marty Smith. At the end of the month, after Florida State escaped to Clemson in overtime, Devon Travis spruced up the place with a message to his much younger brother: “I look up to you!” Thank you for giving me the inspiration to move forward each day.
A few decades earlier, he was one of those kids who longed for a younger brother or sister. “I mean, it was interesting, the splits,” he said. “Mom had me, she got pretty sick. I always told my parents how much I wanted to be an older brother. I will never forget that in 1999, my parents told me that I was finally going to be a big brother. For me, it was one of the best days of my life because I just wanted the opportunity to lead by example.
In the years when Devon had reached double digits in age but Jordan had not, Jordan sometimes refused to even acknowledge Devon’s friends because they dared to mine time that could have gone to Jordan. Of course, all that is long gone, with little brother and friends having grown up to become, on the one hand, groomsmen. Now there’s something entirely different going on, so that amid the hubbub of Florida State’s resurgence, you might imagine an elite athlete standing in the middle of the 79,560 with an empty stomach and two full tear ducts.
