FSU Football: Series vs. Georgia step in right scheduling direction

FSU football will have to wait a few years to face the Bulldogs on the field, but at least getting the games scheduled is a perfect move to change things.

Sometimes, it is good to get some positive affirmation when you are doing your job – and the FSU football team did just that on Tuesday when it was announced that the Seminoles had scheduled a series with the Georgia Bulldogs (one of the many teams that we wrote three weeks ago that the Noles should schedule a future home and home series with).

Yes, we were off by just a couple seasons in our predictions as the teams will meet in the 2027 and 2028 seasons (and the freshman at both schools when the teams play are now in the fifth grade, so we’ve got a while) but anyone from either program who is not excited about these meetings needs to get their pulse checked real quick.

Especially for the FSU football team, getting this series signed on the dotted lines is the best news you could possibly have for the future schedules and the future direction that it seems the program is looking to take.

Florida State Seminoles Football

For starters, it shows that the new leadership in both the coaching staff and the higher ups are not afraid to schedule series against quality non-conference foes. Remember that during the years of the previous coach and leadership, FSU football played arguably just four quality non-conference foes over that eight year span aside from the yearly game against rival Florida.

It was made very clear before that the plan was to play money games – one time deals at non-conference locations – and that’s exactly what three of those games were (2014 Oklahoma State, 2016 Ole Miss and 2017 Alabama) with the Notre Dame game in 2014 being part of their contract with the ACC and essentially given to the Seminoles to play.

Now, I’m not saying that Willie Taggart and the administration are going to be stupid and schedule top teams for all four non-conference games – but there is no reason that the Seminoles can’t play the Gators and another higher power team more often in the same season and still have room for the group of five (and occasional FCS foes that were too much of the norm under the former coach).

Maybe the best thing for the Seminoles is that the first game of the series is taking place in Tallahassee to open the 2027 season – meaning FSU football no longer has to be the team essentially playing second fiddle in the series against top foes.

When the Noles played USC in the late 90s, it was off to Los Angeles to start things off. The Seminoles played at Notre Dame twice and had a “home game” in Orlando before the Fighting Irish played in Tallahassee and faced Oklahoma twice and LSU six times in the regular season before either made their first trip to Florida’s capital.

(Still waiting on Alabama, Michigan, Ohio State and Arizona State to make their return trips to Tallahassee after numerous trips by the Seminoles to play at their stadiums).

Finally, it renews one of the originally “rivalries” for FSU football when they were first getting their feet wet as a major program. Georgia not only played the Seminoles in 1954 – four years before Florida “graced” us with the chance to play them – but came to Tallahassee for the first two games  as they played a total of nine times over a 12 year period.

The Noles will now have games at home in 2027 against Georgia and Miami among others with road trips to Clemson and Florida with the locations reversed the following season – giving fans of the garnet and gold chance to see their team both home and away without having to get on an airplane for the most part.

Hopefully for FSU football fans and the program, this is just the first in a step toward going back to the mentality of playing a quality schedule more often than not – both in the ACC and outside of it.