The last word on the season’s most pressing topics.

It’s a testament to the thoroughness of Florida State’s dominance in the late eighties and early nineties that the national perception of the ‘Noles has consistently been colored at least as much by that decade as by the one that just passed. But these are the grim facts: FSU hasn’t finished in the top 10 of the final Associated Press poll since 2000, hasn’t won 10 games since 2003 and hasn’t won an ACC championship since 2005.

It hasn’t beaten Florida since Ron Zook’s second season in Gainesville, in 2003. With the old ACC dominance shriveling away and Urban Meyer’s Gator Death Star at full strength, the highlight of the last four years was a blowout of Wisconsin in the Champs Sports Bowl. That came on the heels of a three-game losing streak against Wake Forest, and amid three 7-6 finishes in those four years, which were largely stricken from the books, anyway, by a widespread academic cheating scandal.

Over the years, that decline has been laid at the feet of a string of middling, disappointing and occasionally scandalous quarterbacks, injury-ravaged offensive lines and epic flops by the once-highly-touted likes of Fred Rouse, Callahan Bright, Adrian McPherson and Brandon Warren. Other big-name recruits, like Antone Smith and Justin Mincey, finished mediocre careers with little fanfare. But looming over all of it, just as he had in the scorched-earth years, was the titanic scapegoat, Bobby Bowden.

There’s no need to recount Bowden’s rise and fall as the legendary, back-slapping overseer of one of the most dominant runs of his or any era. But as much as he was the common link between the golden years and the slowly fading ‘Noles of the last decade, by the end he had become an ossified, out-of-touch, nepotistic liability, a doddering figurehead overseeing a geriatric coaching staff beset by generational squabbles between Bowden’s old guard and the up-and-coming replacement that had been foisted on them by the university, Jimbo Fisher. The situation was in such obvious disrepair last September that a university trustee openly called for Bowden’s head in the midst of a three-game losing streak – matching the longest of Bowden’s tenure –