Florida State enters the 2026 season ranked No. 35 in Bill Connelly’s final preseason SP+ rankings with a projected win total of 6.6 games. That sounds about like what you’d expect from a team ranked 35th nationally. But while looking through the final SP+ numbers recently, something caught my attention.
SMU is ranked No. 25 with 8.3 projected wins. Florida State is No. 35 with 6.6. At first glance, that looks like a pretty sizable gap between the two teams. Then I looked at their actual SP+ ratings. SMU sits at 12.1. Florida State is at 9.1. That’s only a three-point difference. And because Connelly uses a 2.5-point adjustment for home-field advantage, SMU’s trip to Tallahassee essentially becomes a toss-up. Using those ratings, SMU would be favored by roughly half a point.
So, if SP+ thinks the actual matchup is nearly even, why is SMU projected to win almost two more games than Florida State? The obvious answer is schedule. But that led me to another question.
How much does the schedule actually matter?
And because apparently this is what occupies my brain in the middle of the night, I decided to find out.
Projected wins don’t necessarily equal team quality
Before getting into the experiment, there’s an important distinction to make.
SP+ is designed to evaluate how good a team is. It is an opponent-adjusted predictive rating based on efficiency, explosiveness and other factors. Projected wins are different.
Once you take that team strength and run it through a specific schedule, the difficulty of those opponents and where the games are played become part of the equation. That seems obvious. But I don’t think we always treat it that way when discussing preseason projections.
If Team A is projected for eight wins and Team B is projected for six, most people are naturally going to assume Team A is considerably better. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it just has an easier path.
And with conferences now containing 16, 17 or 18 teams, that distinction matters more than ever. Teams competing in the same conference can face dramatically different schedules while ultimately being judged against each other in the standings. Strength of schedule rankings help provide context, but even those don’t completely answer the question.
Florida State has the No. 34 strength of schedule according to SP+. SMU is No. 52. Okay. But what does the difference between No. 34 and No. 52 actually mean in terms of wins? That’s what I wanted to know.
So, what if we just swapped the schedules?
The idea was simple. Take SMU exactly as SP+ rates it and make the Mustangs play Florida State’s schedule.
Then take Florida State exactly as SP+ rates it and give the Seminoles SMU’s schedule.
Using Connelly’s final preseason SP+ ratings, his 2.5-point home-field adjustment and a win-probability curve calibrated to the published projected-win totals, here’s what happened:
| Scenario | Projected Wins |
|---|---|
| SMU on its own schedule | 8.3 |
| Florida State on its own schedule | 6.6 |
| SMU on Florida State’s schedule | ~7.4 |
| Florida State on SMU’s schedule | ~7.6 |
Well, that’s interesting. The original projections create a 1.7-win gap between the teams. Swap the schedules, and that gap essentially disappears.
In fact, FSU projects for slightly more wins against SMU’s schedule than SMU does against Florida State’s. Now, before anybody runs off and turns this into “SP+ secretly thinks FSU is better than SMU,” that’s not what the numbers say. SMU still has the higher underlying power rating.
What this does show is that a significant portion of the difference between an 8.3-win projection and a 6.6-win projection has nothing to do with SMU being dramatically better than Florida State. It’s the schedule, and the ACC handed FSU a brutal one this year, especially considering the Noles already had out-of-conference games against two SEC teams.
FSU gets the luxury of playing 7 of the top 8 teams in the ACC by odds to win the conference. Not that an ACC schedule is exactly murder’s row, but FSU has the toughest path of any team in the conference and therefore their win total projection looks rather modest compared to the rest of the pack, but maybe they aren’t as far behind as that number suggests…
And once I saw this, there was no way I was stopping with SMU.
What would FSU’s opponents do against its schedule?
The next step was to run Florida State’s FBS opponents through the same exercise. Keep each team’s SP+ rating exactly the same. Give them Florida State’s 2026 schedule.
Here are the results:
| Team | SP+ Projected Wins | Wins on FSU’s Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| Miami | 10.0 | ~9.7 |
| Alabama | 7.8 | ~8.7 |
| Florida | 7.0 | ~8.1 |
| Clemson | 7.9 | ~7.6 |
| SMU | 8.3 | ~7.4 |
| Louisville | 7.8 | ~7.1 |
| Florida State | 6.6 | ~6.6 |
| Virginia | 7.8 | ~6.3 |
| Pitt | 6.9 | ~5.9 |
| NC State | 7.1 | ~5.7 |
| Boston College | 3.9 | ~3.9 |
A few of those jump off the page.
Virginia
Virginia is projected for 7.8 wins. Florida State is projected for 6.6. If you looked only at those numbers, you might assume Virginia is expected to be the better football team.
SP+ doesn’t think that. Florida State’s rating is 9.1. Virginia’s is 8.1.
Put Virginia against FSU’s schedule, and its projection falls from 7.8 wins to roughly 6.3. That’s a pretty significant difference.
NC State
NC State may be an even better example. The Wolfpack are projected for 7.1 wins against the No. 68 strength of schedule (weakest in the ACC). Their SP+ rating is only 5.7, which is 3.4 points below Florida State. Put NC State against FSU’s schedule and the projection falls to roughly 5.7 wins.
So we’ve gone from:
NC State: 7.1 projected wins
Florida State: 6.6 projected wins
to:
Florida State on its own schedule: 6.6
NC State on FSU’s schedule: 5.7
Same teams. Different context. That’s exactly why projected record and team quality shouldn’t be treated as the same thing. As you can see, 7 opponents’ projected win totals dropped, and an eighth stayed the same. Only the two SEC opponents saw theirs actually increase.
Now let’s do the opposite
This was the part I was most curious about. Instead of putting everyone else against Florida State’s schedule, what happens if Florida State gets to play theirs?
Again, FSU remains the exact same 9.1-rated team in every scenario. Only the schedule changes.
| Schedule | FSU Projected Wins |
|---|---|
| Florida | ~5.4 |
| Alabama | ~5.5 |
| Florida State | ~6.6 |
| Boston College | ~6.8 |
| Clemson | ~6.9 |
| Miami | ~7.2 |
| Louisville | ~7.3 |
| SMU | ~7.6 |
| Pitt | ~7.7 |
| Virginia | ~8.0 |
| NC State | ~8.0 |
That’s a pretty remarkable range. Take the exact same Florida State team and put it against Florida’s schedule? Roughly 5.4 wins.
Give it Alabama’s? About 5.5.
Give it Virginia or NC State’s schedule? Right around eight wins.
Again, nothing about Florida State itself changed. That’s purely the path.
Some projected records are more misleading than others
This is where I think the experiment becomes useful beyond just Florida State. Take Alabama and SMU.
SMU is projected for 8.3 wins. Alabama is projected for 7.8. If all you knew were those two numbers, you might reasonably assume the teams were fairly comparable, with perhaps a slight edge toward SMU.
But SP+ has Alabama rated at 17.6 and SMU at 12.1. Put both teams against Florida State’s schedule, and the difference becomes much clearer. Alabama projects for roughly 8.7 wins. SMU projects for roughly 7.4. The schedule was suppressing Alabama’s projected record while helping SMU’s.
Florida is another good example.
The Gators are projected for only 7.0 wins, barely above Florida State’s 6.6. But Florida is ranked No. 20 in SP+ with a 15.2 rating while facing the nation’s No. 9 strength of schedule. Put Florida against FSU’s schedule, and the projection climbs to roughly 8.1 wins. Put FSU against Florida’s schedule, and the Seminoles fall to around 5.4. So Florida’s seven-win projection isn’t necessarily telling you Florida is a seven-win-quality team. It’s telling you Florida is a good team being asked to play a brutal schedule.
Unfortunately, the numbers aren’t always going to tell us what we want to hear. That’s kind of the point.
And then there’s Miami
Miami is projected for 10 wins with the No. 49 strength of schedule. Surely some of that is schedule-driven, right? A little. Put Miami against Florida State’s schedule and the Hurricanes still project for roughly 9.7 wins. So, no. They’re just rated really freaking high, but that’s what a 40 million dollar roster can do for you and should.
Moving on.
Seven games could decide Florida State’s season
There’s another part of Florida State’s 6.6-win projection that deserves some context.
Using the location-adjusted SP+ ratings, seven games on FSU’s schedule fall within one touchdown:
- SMU: FSU roughly +0.5
- Virginia: FSU roughly -3.5
- at Louisville: FSU roughly +4.5
- Clemson: FSU roughly +1.5
- at Pitt: essentially a pick’em
- NC State: FSU roughly -5.9
- Florida: FSU roughly +3.6
Five of those seven are in Tallahassee. That’s significant, as FSU was 5-3 at home last year with dominant wins over Alabama and a solid Wake Forest team. I don’t need to remind us of the road struggles.
Florida State isn’t looking at a schedule with six obvious wins, six obvious losses, and very little movement in between. It’s looking at a schedule loaded with games that SP+ essentially considers competitive coin flips.
Those seven swing games produce roughly 3.5 expected wins. In other words, the model is basically telling FSU to split them. That’s where the season lives.
If Florida State protects Doak Campbell Stadium and wins a little more than its share of those close games, getting to eight wins isn’t some outrageous scenario that requires beating Alabama and Miami. There are paths to get there without either. But the other side is just as important.
If FSU continues to struggle away from home and loses more than its share of those toss-up games, the floor drops quickly. That’s why I don’t think 6.6 projected wins should simply be interpreted as:
“SP+ thinks Florida State is a six-win team.”
A better interpretation might be:
SP+ thinks Florida State is a top-35 team playing a difficult schedule with a ton of variance built into it.
That’s a much different statement.
Welcome to the era of the “schedule team”
College football has always had uneven schedules. That’s nothing new. But conference expansion has made the issue much more pronounced. When leagues contained 10 or 12 teams, there was at least some consistency in who everyone played. Now? You can have two teams in the same conference chasing the same championship while one draws a gauntlet and the other misses several of the league’s best teams entirely.
We’re already hearing the term “schedule team” thrown around more often. Maybe this gives us a way to actually put a number to it. Call it Schedule Swap Wins. The idea isn’t to replace strength of schedule rankings, SP+ or any other advanced metric. It’s simply another way to answer a very practical question:
If these two teams swapped schedules, how different would their records look?
That’s ultimately what I was trying to figure out when I started digging through these numbers. Florida State is still ranked No. 35. It is still projected for 6.6 wins.
None of this suddenly turns the Seminoles into a top-10 team, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee they’re going to beat SMU, Clemson, Florida or anybody else. They still have to go play the games. But it does provide some useful context to the idea that FSU is dramatically behind several teams carrying significantly higher projected win totals. In some cases, it isn’t.
Give Florida State SMU’s schedule, and it projects for roughly 7.6 wins. Give it Virginia or NC State’s schedule, and it gets to approximately eight. Give those same teams Florida State’s schedule and their projections fall substantially. When comparing teams in the superconference era, there’s probably one question we’re going to need to start asking more often: What would their record look like if they had to play the other guy’s schedule?
Maybe Florida State isn’t as far behind as the projected records make it appear. Or maybe they’ll go out there and lose all the toss-up games and make this entire 3 a.m. experiment look ridiculous. That’s why they play them. It did slightly change the way I view the 2026 season, though. And it tells me FSU is just as close to winning 8 games as they are 5 based on the probabilities using SP+ data.
| Wins | Approx. Probability |
|---|---|
| 5 or fewer | 24% |
| 6 | 24% |
| 7 | 25% |
| 8+ | 28% |
| 9+ | 11% |
We know the margin between last year’s team winning 8 or 9 games vs the 5 they actually did was also very slim. The Noles just found ways to lose games they shouldn’t have. That’s why those swing games are so massive for FSU this year. They are heavy favorites in 3 games. They are multi-score dogs in 2. In the other 7 games… there is less than a one-score gap between them.
FSU went 0-4 in one-score games last year. They must find ways to win those games because the gap is so small that it comes down to the little things rather than trying to bridge some massive gap. If they can do that, a successful season could be within reach more than it may seem based on raw odds or win totals. Thanks for reading, and Go Noles!