Mike Norvell is hardly guaranteed a 2026 season as Florida State head coach.
And yet, if he’s going to be here, he’ll certainly want to have a player like freshman running back Ousmane Kromah on his roster next year.
That’s why it seems like Norvell and the offensive coaching staff came to their senses a bit of late and are going to give the freshman standout a bigger role in the Seminoles’ final three regular-season games, starting Saturday vs. Virginia Tech (7:30 p.m. on ACC Network).
“Excited about how he’s grown,” Norvell said of Kromah this week. “You talk about confidence and seeing guys progressing, just really the finer details of what to do, how to do it, making sure we’re in the right spot whether it’s in the run game or pass game. I think he’s really ascending as the season’s going.
“We have a good running back room with guys that have experience and capabilities, but he’s definitely going to be a key part of what we want to see as we continue to roll through the season.”
It seemed Kromah was going to get a large role from the onset of the season when he got seven carries against Alabama, nine against the next two overmatched opponents (for 80 yards at an 8.9 per-carry average) and 12 carries for 63 yards against Virginia. He also had three catches for 59 yards over that span.
In the five games since, the bruising freshman who seems to have a knack for never being tackled by the first defender who touches him has seen his carries fade. He has no more than seven in any of the last five games, and that has shrunk even more to four against Stanford and Wake Forest and a season-low three carries for 22 yards (7.3 per carry) against Clemson.
Kromah’s 5.96 yards per carry this season rank second on the team to only Samuel Singleton Jr. (8.17) among players with more than 20 carries. He’s third on the team in rushing yards (310), only 123 behind Gavin Sawchuk for the team lead on nearly half as many carries (94-52). He’s also fifth on the team in receiving yards with eight catches for 144 yards (18 per catch) and a receiving touchdown.
And yet, Kromah is still looking for his first career touchdown run because Sawchuk has eight of them and normally gets the ball in the red zone.
Nothing against Sawchuk, but it’s easy to see that Kromah has a chance to be a bigger part of the future than the Oklahoma transfer.
Kromah wasn’t an easy high-school prospect to land. The Seminoles had to pull off perhaps the biggest flip of Norvell’s tenure to get him off his Georgia commitment and land him in Tallahassee.
With things in flux, little is certain about the future of the coaching staff or the roster around the Florida State football program.
But the only way it feels likely that Kromah will be a part of that future, be it for Norvell or another coach, is if he’s given a larger role and the chance to shine which he sure looks ready for from everything we’ve seen from him this season.
