Jordan Travis' injury sinks Florida State's season

 Hopefully longtime readers of the Misery Index understand that it is mostly a semi-serious vehicle to look back at each college football Saturday and analyze some of the more notable results through the lens of angry fandom — which, in the end, is what makes people so passionate about the sport to begin with.

Rarely is watching this sport or being a fan of a team associated with actual, real life misery. It's just entertainment, after all. But for maybe the first time in a decade of doing this every week, we saw that very thing unfold Saturday at Florida State. 

There’s nothing snarky or funny to say about what happened to the Seminoles against North Alabama, when quarterback Jordan Travis was carted off after a run that ended with part of his lower body bent the wrong way. Though the official diagnosis had not been given Saturday night, we don’t really need one. It’s bad, and it’s almost certainly going to end his season and Florida State’s hopes of making the College Football Playoff.

Quite simply, it's heartbreaking. It's brutal. It’s the one truly miserable part of the sport. 

The Seminoles eventually won the game, but that hardly mattered. You could tell in the body language on their sideline and in the morose tone of coach Mike Norvell’s halftime interview that the score didn't seem so important. 

For the team, for the coaching staff and for the fans, this is as bad as it gets. Florida State had been building for years toward a season like this, and it could hardly have been going better. The Seminoles had passed every test, starting in Week 1 with LSU and running all the way through the ACC schedule. All that realistically stood between Florida State and the playoff was a trip to underwhelming Florida next week and a date with Louisville in the ACC championship game. 

Everyone who plays or watches football understands that an entire season or career can change with one bad step or one dangerous tackle. But the idea that it would happen in a throwaway game against an FCS team? Who could even come up with something so awful? 

Travis, a sixth-year senior, had improved every year in Norvell's program to the point where he became one of the best quarterbacks in the sport. He didn't deserve his college career to end this way, and neither did his teammates, whose hopes of doing something special this season were largely in his hands.