Florida State football will play a third of its games this season on Fridays or Mondays. It feels like a crime to have the Seminoles play on any day other than Saturday, but this schedule speaks to both the successes and the failures of FSU football.
The ACC wants to establish Friday primetime as a preferred slot for the conference. FSU remains one of the biggest TV draws in the ACC and by having two primetime Friday games, the Seminoles will be in the spotlight on the lead-in day to the Saturday schedule. It's not where FSU wants to be, but it's where they are and the best way to get back to being a "Saturday" team is to win the games on Friday.
2026 ACC Friday football schedule pic.twitter.com/ft8AFoHrIk
— FBSchedules.com (@FBSchedules) May 15, 2026
The FSU-Pitt game was a late flex to Friday, moving it to November 13. All the other non-Saturday games had been determined previously. FSU will be playing SMU on Labor Day in a primetime slot on ESPN and the annual matchup against Florida will be on Black Friday at 3:30 p.m., putting the Sunshine Showdown outside the hectic rivalry week Saturday.Â
And, of course, there's the FSU-Louisville game on October 9, which hasn't been as bad of a draw for the Seminoles as some fans think. FSU beat Louisville on Thursday night in 2014 and on Friday night in 2022 with Tate Rodemaker coming in for an injured Jordan Travis to pull off the upset.Â
Tate Rodemaker. Absolute dot. Just phenomenal stuff.
— Unnecessary Roughness (@UnnecRoughness) September 17, 2022
(Johnny Wilson is really good too) pic.twitter.com/yFve5Eg2ix
'FSU Fridays' has been a TV ratings winner for the ACC
Let's not fail to see the forest from the trees here. The ACC and ESPN put FSU on Fridays because the Seminoles deliver the eyeballs. Last year's Virginia game, a 46-38 overtime loss in Charlottesville, delivered a massive number with an average of 4.4 million viewers. It was the fifth-most watched college football game that week regardless of day, ahead of Notre Dame-Arkansas, USC-Illinois and a host of other games that were on the Saturday schedule of nationally televised games. It was also the highest rated Friday game on ESPN since 1996.
Even in FSU's worst years, the Seminoles can draw. They played a Friday game at Duke in the disastrous 2024 season. The game was moved from ESPN to ESPN2 and still drew an average of 1.25 million viewers. FSU was 1-5 when that game was played and people still wanted to watch the Seminoles. The 2022 Louisville game drew an average of 2.75 million viewers, which, at the time, made it ESPN's second-highest rated Friday night game of the past five years.
In the current landscape of college football, the ACC isn't must-watch TV for fans and the opportunities for those great primetime slots on Saturdays aren't available like they were before the SEC jumped from CBS to ABC/ESPN. We would all love the Seminoles to be under the lights on Saturday nights, but these days that means being on the ACC Network, and those games are not heavily promoted. Nothing around FSU football is where anyone wants, but success on Friday in 2026 will lead to more opportunities on Saturday in 2027 and beyond.
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