Florida State's interim staff is adding a lot of experience in one hire.
Veteran defensive coach Paul Pasqualoni is set to join the Seminoles next week as an analyst to help the defensive staff, according to ESPN's Pete Thamel. FSU Wire also reported the move on Thursday.
Pasqualoni walks into a building that was flipped upside down on Sunday. Florida State fired Mike Norvell on November 1, along with defensive coordinator Tony White and safeties coach Evan Cooper. Rick Stockstill, who had been the program's director of scouting on offense, is the interim head coach, and linebackers coach Ernie Sims took over defensive play-calling.
The Seminoles are 3-5 heading into Saturday's game at Boston College, with trips to Pitt and home games against NC State and Florida left after that.
Pasqualoni was a walk-on linebacker at Penn State under Joe Paterno, then started coaching at Cheshire High School in Connecticut in 1972. After stops at Southern Connecticut and five seasons as head coach at Western Connecticut, he joined the Syracuse staff in 1987 and took over as head coach in 1991.
He went 107-59-1 in 14 seasons at Syracuse, won four Big East titles and went 6-3 in bowl games, including wins in the 1992 Fiesta Bowl and a 41-0 win over Clemson in the 1995 Gator Bowl. He later went 10-18 at UConn from 2011 until he was let go four games into the 2013 season.
The NFL portion of his career is just as long. He coached tight ends, linebackers and the defensive line in Dallas, was the interim defensive coordinator there in 2010, and served as defensive coordinator for the Dolphins in 2008 and 2009 and the Lions in 2018 and 2019. He also coached the defensive line for the Bears, Texans and Panthers.
He coached the defensive line at Boston College in 2016 and 2017 - the team Florida State plays this weekend - and spent 2020 and 2021 at Florida as a special assistant to the head coach before Billy Napier named him director of advanced scouting and self scout.
More recently, he has coached for the UFL's Memphis Showboats and worked as a defensive analyst at Rhode Island. Last fall, he finished his second season as the defensive line coach at Avon Old Farms (CT), a prep school in his home state, helping the Winged Beavers go 10-0 and win the Drew Gamere Bowl.
Plenty of the high school coaches reading this will appreciate a 77-year-old former Big East champion and NFL coordinator spending his Friday nights coaching up defensive linemen at an east coast prep school.
He has never worked with Stockstill, according to FSU Wire, but he does have history in the building. Interim athletic director Bruce Warwick was Pasqualoni's director of football operations at Syracuse from 1996 to 1999.
When Steve Wilks took over as Carolina's interim head coach in 2022, two of the assistants he fired were Pasqualoni and Evan Cooper, the same safeties coach Florida State let go on Sunday.
Sims is calling the defense with four games left and a staff that lost two coaches on Sunday. Pasqualoni has called defenses for two NFL teams, and he'll be in the room as a key contributor for the final three.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.