TALLAHASSEE — Rather than toppling off the college football map and plunging into the Gulf of Mexico as seemed plausible only two seasons ago, Florida State has resurged to national relevance and stadium fullness. It qualifies once more as abuzz. The empty seats at Doak Campbell Stadium have died of chronic victory. The Spanish moss on the huge campus seems to hang with cheer.
Yet as the No. 4 Seminoles (6-0), who haven’t lost in 12 games across 12 months, await No. 16 Duke (5-1) and an inbound 79,560, that sold-out magic number that vanished for that while from 2015 to 2022, there’s an ample telling of the tale from the perspective of one. He’s 32. He’s rather newly and very happily married (20 months). He played baseball at Florida State from 2010 to 2012. He’s a coach in the Atlanta Braves organization. He has been to the heights of sports himself.
Yet by 7:30 p.m. Saturday and kickoff, he might not have eaten, and he might have wept.
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“My weekends,” he says, “are very nerve-racking.”
For the four years from 2015 to 2018, while his alma mater began to misplace the throne it had known or at least neared for an eon, Devon Travis played second base for the Toronto Blue Jays. It upheld the dream that burned every waking day since childhood until it ended at age 27 with a mean-spirited array of injuries. Now he has come across something almost too meaningful to describe: watching his brother, Jordan Travis, younger by nine years while also the next child in the family sequence, pilot the Seminoles as a quarterback in a sixth college year along a gradual climb all the way to 13 touchdown passes with one interception in a spotless season.
All the while, the elder Travis watches, and the elder Travis suffers.
“I get more nervous for his games than I ever had for any game I ever played,” he says by phone from West Palm Beach, Fla., their hometown. “There’s days I don’t eat before the games. Oh, yeah, man, it’s real.”
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As of both kickoff and season kickoff for the night game of Sunday, Sept. 3 in Orlando against LSU, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He did not eat in the first quarter, the second or the third. After three quarters with Florida State ahead 24-17 in an eventual 45-24 statement, “I finally mustered the courage to get food,” he recalled. He and his wife, Allison, ventured to the pizza line. It groaned with length. They stood for a moment. “I told her: ‘I can’t wait in line. I’m too nervous.’” He returned to his seat.
Other times, he has felt something akin to disbelief seeing Jordan run out of the tunnel and into the Doak. “I’ve cried multiple times in the stands this year,” he said, “because I see a [little] kid who was in the stadium [from 2010 to 2012] and across the street at Dick Howser Stadium [the baseball stadium]” watching his older brother play baseball, wearing smallish Seminoles jerseys while their parents missed only one home series the whole span despite the daunting six-hour drive. “And when I look at my brother, I cry happy tears because I’m just so happy and grateful that he was given this opportunity to put on that uniform and run out of that tunnel at Doak.”
The energy around that run has intensified, and the markers are abundant. To anyone who hadn’t been around Tallahassee since the College Football Playoff year of 2014, it could feel almost like 2014, save for the cannabis dispensaries popping up beneath the usual array of injury-lawyer billboards. Over at the Tallahassee airport, even a football boycotter — should you ever find one around here — might be able to tell how well the Seminoles have fared lately by the weekends and the private-jet, corporate-jet traffic.
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“Yeah, I mean, especially having been here for so long [23 years], you can kind of get a sense for how well the team is going based on the kind of traffic that’s coming in and out,” said Jim Durwin, the deputy director of aviation and not a football boycotter. A bigger game such as this Duke one carries its hints, stretching the talents of the jet parkers. “The private planes,” Durwin said, “will sort of overflow their normal parking areas.”
“Happy one-year anniversary!” Ehsan Kassim wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, noting the losslessness since Oct. 15, 2022, when Florida State fell, 34-28, at home to Clemson, drifted to 4-3 and heard third-year coach Mike Norvell say, “There’s no such thing as a moral victory or any of that crap.”
It’s “a place of expectation,” Norvell said Wednesday after practice, four seasons after he came over from Memphis to a program that went 152-19-1 from 1987 to 2000 — that will sow some expectation — and then 26-33 from 2017 to 2021.
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“And so you feel the energy,” Norvell said. “I think our fan base and people around this program have seen growth. There’s still a lot of growth that needs to be done and a lot of improvement that has to be done. But it’s a place of expectation. Our expectations of ourselves to go out there and get better and put the best display of who we are on and off the field, and I think our guys, you know, they’ve embraced that. I think there’s an excitement around our program and our fan base and just everybody associated with our program for what that looks like and trying to push to that standard.”
By now there’s unmistakable high hope attached to homecoming week on a giant campus with rows of sidewalk tables offering join-ups for ROTC, sororities, fraternities, Sustainable Campus, mental health awareness, a dance marathon, the student union, the Pride Student Union, the Dominican Student Association and on and on. Amid and atop all of it, “Football matters,” as Norvell put it. As a Wednesday morning practice began, with drills in the indoor facility, with Waka Flocka Flame et al. booming from the speakers, nine attendants spaced themselves neatly along the back of the end zone with crates with bottles for ready hydration.
By now 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 dents, handles a media session with his placid aplomb. He says, “How are y’all doing,” to the reporters, and, “We have not reached even close to our potential yet, which is crazy,” and, “I love this football team more than anything in the world.”
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His brother called him a “humble, nice, easygoing, almost boring, to be honest, kid.” He said, “Without football, you could give him a fishing pole 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 football with Jordan,” Devon said. They don’t ask, Why did you make that read? “That’s a no-go with Jordan. He leaves the stadium and it’s over.”
Still, Devon Travis finds himself uniquely positioned to mull a topic possibly unanswerable: How much of the fresh Florida State excitement trades on gratitude after a downturn, and how much of it trades on entitlement after that 152-19-1? Travis sees the former in the stands, for sure, and he sees the latter on X, formerly known as Twitter, the hellscape steeped in the arts of nitpicking and browbeating. “Twitter,” he said, “is an amazing place for people to be able to follow sports. It’s also an absolute deathtrap for people.” He said, “Especially with Florida State fans, I don’t understand anybody being upset about 6-0.”
He has reeled at times from the mindless spite directed at his 19-year-old, 20-year-old, 21-year-old, 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. Late that month, after Florida State escaped at 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 push forward every day.”
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Mere decades earlier, he had come along as one of those kids who yearns for a younger sibling. “I mean, it was interesting, the big gap,” he said. “Mom had me, she got pretty sick. I always told my parents how badly I wanted to be an older brother. I’ll never forget in 1999, my parents told me I was finally going to be a big brother. For me, it was one of the better days of my life because I just wanted the opportunity to set an example.”
By the years when Devon had reached double-digit ages but Jordan had not, Jordan sometimes refused even to acknowledge Devon’s friends because they had dared to extract time that might have gone to Jordan. That’s all long gone, of course, with both little brother and friends grown up to become, for one thing, groomsmen. Now there’s something else altogether going on, an elite athlete who doesn’t miss the spotlight watching an elite athlete who has grappled with the spotlight. Amid the hubbub of the Florida State resurgence, you might just picture one elite athlete standing amid the 79,560 with one empty stomach and two full tear ducts.
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