I don't mean this as a criticism (I'm not a stickler for discipline), but historically, it takes a lot to get kicked off a Bobby Bowden-led team. Still, there are no surprises with this one: Preston Parker is officially booted from Florida State after his unfortunate nap in the McDonald's drive-through lane Saturday morning, his second weed-related arrest in a little under a year. What this means for Parker: A stint at a lower-division school or long-shot bid at catching on somewhere as a free agent, if all goes well. What it means for Florida State: Four of last year's top five in all-purpose yards are gone, leaving an unusually young, relatively middling cast in their wake.

After their Champs Sports Bowl wipeout over Wisconsin, I wrote about resisting the urge to go on assuming Florida State and Miami "always have the talent, if they can just put it together," when recent on-field evidence seems to suggest otherwise. With the recruiting rankings in general and the talent leaving on offense, specifically, that's been an easy assumption to make: Leading rusher Antone Smith came to Tallahassee as a five-star all-everything; leading receiver Greg Carr was a towering four-star who hauled in nine touchdowns in his first seven games and averaged 21 yards per catch as a true freshman; Parker, while his numbers last year dipped dramatically from a breakout 2007, was still one of the most consistent and versatile players on the offense. Those three accounted for a little over 35 percent of the 'Noles' yards from scrimmage last year.

That's hardly a crippling blow, but based on the hype and production of the returning talent behind that trio, I don't think overestimation is going to be a problem:

Not catastrophic, but nothing special, either: If you're not a Florida State fan, those are probably some very foreign names to you. The two guys who really pop out as possibly first-rate talents (good enough, say, to be in the queue at Florida) are Surrency and Fortson, who were both very involved in their first year in the program but generally on the fringe; ahead of them, Bert Reed and Taiwan Easterling seem fairly generic as front-line options, and Reed should be on thin ice this year, anyway -- he served three different one-game suspensions last year, one of them following the on-campus brawl that also landed Easterling and Surrency on the bench for a game. Like Miami, FSU has had exactly one skill player voted All-ACC since the league expanded in 2005 (Carr was second team in 2006), and hasn't produced a 1,000-yard rusher or receiver in that span; Smith, Carr and/or Parker were good bets to break those barriers, but unless one of the true freshmen is an instant revelation -- running back Chris Thompson, maybe? -- those droughts should continue.

Unlike Miami, however, FSU showed some real signs of consistent offensive life last year: The 'Noles led the ACC in scoring by almost a touchdown per game, and even if you remove the fat days against I-AA patsies Western Carolina and Chattanooga, they averaged 29 points against I-A defenses, most since the 2003 conference championship team -- the last time FSU had a legitimate star on offense (devastating running back Greg Jones, before he was injured, as well as All-ACC receiver Craphonso Thorpe), won double-digit games and still held a plausible claim to the title of league hegemon.

If they're going to reclaim any part of that, it's going to be the Jimbo Fisher way, which is clearly more oriented toward running the ball and spreading it around to a lot of different players, two areas where FSU was significantly improved last year. In contrast to the youth at receiver, the offensive line returns intact after improving the team's overall yards per carry by a full yard from 2007 to '08; with some help from Christian Ponder's scrambling, the running game was viable on a weekly basis for the first time in years. I'm sure I'll go into more depth on this at some point in the next six months, but for now I'll leave it at this: If the progression into a more rugged, "do your job" kind of offense under Fisher and offensive line coach Rick Trickett continues at that pace, anyone resembling the flashy blazers of yore will be much more of a luxury than they ever were under Mark Richt and Jeff Bowden.