There are games that count as losses in the standings, and there are games that become referendums on the direction of a program.
Monday night against No. 19 SMU was the latter for Mike Norvell.
Florida State entered 2026 after consecutive losing seasons; 2-10 in 2024 and 5-7 in 2025 following the 13-1 ACC championship season of 2023. Norvell began this year sitting on perhaps the hottest seat in college football, with the argument for patience increasingly dependent on the idea that Florida State was finally ready to turn progress behind the scenes into results on the field.
That made SMU more than an early-season ranked opponent. It was an opportunity to provide evidence that the rebuild of the rebuild was working. After an opening-week win over New Mexico State that produced its own collection of warning signs, Florida State needed to demonstrate that the mistakes were temporary rather than systemic.
Instead, the Seminoles lost 27-24 in a game that somehow felt both extremely close and nowhere near as close as the score indicated. And fittingly, before Florida State’s problems were exposed under the lights, the lights themselves went out.
Minutes before kickoff on Bobby Bowden Field at Doak Campbell Stadium, a power disruption caused by an electrical short in the main transformer knocked out large portions of the stadium’s electrical infrastructure. The game, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET, eventually kicked off around 9:15 after a delay of roughly an hour and 45 minutes.
It created one of the strangest environments imaginable for a nationally televised college football game. Florida State and SMU agreed to begin without coach-to-player helmet communication. Sideline iPads were unavailable. There was no normal official replay review system, the scoreboard and public-address systems were impacted, and the official game clock initially had to be kept by the officials on the field. Some systems returned as the game progressed; helmet communication was restored late in the second quarter, but kickoff essentially felt like college football transported backward several decades.
Norvell defended the decision to play afterward.
“As long as it was going to be balanced and equal on each side, then it was adjustments to be made.” He was right about that. Whatever disadvantages the outage created for Florida State also existed for SMU. However, there can be no technological excuse for what happened afterward.
Because once the football started, the biggest problem wasn’t the electricity. It was execution.
SMU won by three points. The stat sheet says it probably should have won by considerably more.
The Mustangs outgained Florida State 585-324. SMU produced 430 passing yards compared with FSU’s 125. SMU averaged 8.7 yards perplay to Florida State’s 4.8. The Mustangs accumulated 23 first downs to FSU’s 16 and converted 8 of 14 third downs while the Seminoles managed an astonishingly poor 2 of 15.
Florida State actually won the rushing battle, 199-155, and possessed the ball for more than 32 minutes. But those advantages were overwhelmed by the discrepancy in explosive offense and passing efficiency. More damning: Florida State forced four SMU turnovers while committing only one.
That should be a winning formula.
Instead, FSU turned those four takeaways into just seven points. Norvell acknowledged as much afterward. “When you get four turnovers, you need to be able to put points on the board.” Florida State was handed chance after chance to win a game in which it was being badly outplayed, and still couldn’t take it. And one of the main reasons was the indefensible play by the defense.
The most troubling part of Florida State’s defensive performance was not simply that Kevin Jennings threw for 430 yards and three touchdowns. It was how those yards happened.
This was precisely the area that raised alarms against New Mexico State: defensive communication, alignment and coverage responsibility. Last week, those issues could be dismissed as opening-game mistakes. Against SMU, they became a pattern.
Jennings’ first touchdown was perhaps the most blatant example. On first down from midfield, Jalen Cooper got behind the Florida State defense for a 50-yard touchdown. There wasn’t some brilliant route combination that left the Seminoles helpless. There wasn’t a defender who simply got beaten physically. Florida State busted the coverage.
Norvell didn’t attempt to sugarcoat it afterward.
“Just a total bust in coverage.” He explained that there was a wrong signal involved. That’s significant because it means the problem wasn’t talent. It was communication and execution, exactly the type of issue that appeared repeatedly one week earlier.
And it wasn’t isolated. SMU’s explosive-play chart is brutal. The Mustangs produced eight passes of at least 15 yards for 304 yards, 69 percent of their total passing output. Cooper’s 50-yard touchdown was only part of it. Jalen Hale ripped off a 64-yard reception. Randy Pittman Jr. produced a 30-yard gain. Then, with the game tied 17-17 early in the fourth quarter, Yannick Smith caught a short pass and took it 79 yards for a touchdown.
That’s not merely losing one-on-one battles.
That’s a defense hemorrhaging explosives.
For a team supposedly emphasizing communication, details and fundamentals after last week’s film, seeing the same problems seven days later is exponentially more concerning.
Norvell admitted that the problems extended beyond one coverage call.
“It’s player, it’s coach, it’s all of us.” He isn’t lying, but ultimately, when the same organizational mistakes continue showing up, responsibility moves upward.
The defense deserves substantial criticism, but Florida State’s passing offense was equally unacceptable. Ashton Daniels finished 12-of-23 for 125 yards and one touchdown. He wasn’t intercepted, and his athleticism absolutely gave Florida State something. Daniels rushed for 71 net yards and scored an eight-yard touchdown in the first quarter. But quarterbacks at Florida State cannot survive on what they provide as runners.
Eventually, they have to throw the football.
Daniels averaged just 5.4 yards per pass attempt, while Jennings averaged 11.9. FSU’s entire passing offense produced only four completions that qualified on the stat book’s explosive-play chart. One of them was the 39-yard touchdown to Samuel Singleton Jr. that tied the game at 24 with 8:17 remaining.
Daniels deserves criticism for missed reads and opportunities, but laying everything at his feet would be dishonest. The offensive line was awful in critical situations. SMU finished with three sacks for 19 yards and eight tackles for loss. More damaging than the raw sack total was the number of passing downs in which Daniels never appeared comfortable enough to allow routes to develop. Norvell said it himself: “We didn’t do a great job in protecting.”
Later, when specifically asked about Daniels and the offensive line, Norvell acknowledged “reads that we can be better at” alongside “protections that we need to give more time on.” That combination produced the worst possible offense: a quarterback who isn’t consistently processing or delivering the ball downfield behind an offensive line that isn’t consistently giving him time to do it.
That’s how you go 2-for-15 on third down. That’s how you punt six times. And that’s how a team that forces four turnovers still scores only 24 points.
And Yet, Florida State still had every chance. Perhaps the most frustrating part is that FSU somehow fought its way back into the game.
Daniels’ rushing touchdown made it 7-7. Ousmane Kromah, easily one of Florida State’s brightest offensive performers with 116 rushing yards on 22 carries,scored from six yards out late in the third quarter to tie the game at 17. After Smith’s 79-yard touchdown put SMU back ahead, Daniels answered with the 39-yard touchdown to Singleton to make it 24-24.
Florida State had survived the busted coverages, the passing-game dysfunction and a 261-yard total-offense deficit. And then the defense allowed SMU to march 71 yards in nine plays, setting up Nick Reed’s 20-yard field goal with 21 seconds remaining.
27-24. Ballgame.
Norvell described it afterward as another game decided by “one plays.” But at some point, close losses stop being bad luck. They become identity.
This is where the evaluation of Mike Norvell has to move beyond emotion. Florida State is now 1-1. Nobody should fire a coach simply because he lost by three points to the No. 19 team in the country. But that isn’t the case against Norvell. The case is cumulative. After going 13-1 in 2023, Florida State collapsed to 2-10. The Seminoles followed that with 5-7. Norvell entered 2026 needing to demonstrate that the failures of those seasons had been corrected. Instead, through two games, the same problems continue to appear: busted assignments, poor third-down execution, offensive-line instability, limited quarterback production and a team incapable of consistently converting opportunities into wins.
After Monday night’s loss, Norvell’s record at Florida State sits at 39-35 overall, 22-27 in ACC play, 25-16 at home, 10-17 in true road games.However, since the start of 2024, Norvell is 8-18 overall, 3-14 in ACC games, 0-11 on the road.
Even Norvell’s own postgame assessment sounded less like the diagnosis of a new problem and more like a summary of everything that has plagued this program. “Everybody in the program has to improve. We have to be better.” He is right.
But in Year 7, “we have to get better” cannot continue functioning as the answer.
Florida State forced four turnovers at home, rushed for nearly 200 yards, battled a ranked opponent into the final seconds and still lost because SMU was fundamentally better at quarterback play, offensive execution, explosive plays and critical downs.
The lights going out was bizarre. The scoreboard going out was bizarre. Playing without normal technology was bizarre. Florida State’s problems were not. They were painfully familiar. And when judging Mike Norvell not by one three-point loss, but by the trajectory of the program, the repeated nature of the mistakes and the standard attached to the Florida State job, this performance renders the verdict clear.