Florida State Should Make Glenn Schumann Its Dan Lanning Hire

When Dan Lanning left Georgia for the head coaching job at Oregon and left Glenn Schumann with a fairly unreasonable assignment. 

Georgia had just won a national championship and five defenders went in the first round of the NFL Draft. 

Schumann got the headset. 

In his first season calling the defense, the Bulldogs led the country against the run, went 15-0 and held TCU to a touchdown in the national title game. 

That year ought to interest the people picking the Florida State Seminoles next head coach. 

The Seminoles know how quickly a championship roster can come apart. They won the ACC in 2023, missed bowl games the next two seasons and were 3-5 when they fired Mike Norvell on Sunday. 

Whoever takes over in Tallahassee has to answer a question that outlasts any one recruiting class. When the best players leave, who’s ready to take their snaps? 

Schumann could spend a good part of his interview answering that one with linebackers. 

Roquan Smith won the Butkus Award in 2017. Nakobe Dean won it four years later. Jalon Walker made it three in 2024. By the following fall, with Walker in the NFL, CJ Allen was a consensus All-American and a finalist for the same award. 

A high school linebacker from Jacksonville could sit across from Schumann, ask what he could do for him and spend the rest of the visit watching the answer on film.

Kirby Smart knew Schumann before any of those players had a trophy. Schumann started at Alabama as an undergraduate assistant in 2008. 

By the time Smart left Tuscaloosa, Schumann had worked in player development and personnel under Nick Saban. Smart brought him to Athens to coach inside linebackers. Schumann was 25. 

Florida State would be getting him at 36, with experience evaluating players from the personnel office and coaching them through the mistakes that can make an evaluation look foolish on a Saturday afternoon.

Overall, Schumann has championship experience with six national championships and eight SEC conference championships between stops at Alabama and Georgia.

Oregon faced the obvious objection when it hired Lanning. 

What happens when a defensive coordinator has to hire somebody to coach quarterbacks and the head coach down the hall is suddenly him? Three seasons later, Lanning’s Ducks scored 45 against Penn State in a shootout to win the Big Ten in their first year in the league, went undefeated, and got the No. 1 spot in the College Football Playoff that landed the Ducks in the Rose Bowl.

Florida State should ask Schumann who would run his offense, who would develop his quarterback and how much authority he’d give both men. Those answers matter as much as anything Georgia did to TCU. 

What I like about Schumann for this job is that Florida State would have something to sell the day he walked in. 

In living rooms from South Florida to his native Valdosta, he could put on tape of three generations of Georgia linebackers and explain what each kid had to learn. 

That’s how I’d want a Florida State coach to spend his first December. I’d give him the chance.