Mike Norvell built his 2023 ACC Championship team through the transfer portal, but after a 2024 collapse, Florida State began loading up on high school talent. The real volume came with 34 signees in the 2026 class, but for this season, the bigger impact should come from the 20th-ranked 2025 class.
One of the top recruits in 2025, Ousmane Kromah, looked every bit the top-100 recruit in Florida State’s 34-17 win over New Mexico State on Saturday, rushing for 115 yards and a touchdown on just 14 carries. Kromah wasn’t, however, the top-ranked player in the 2025 FSU class by 247Sports; that distinction belonged to four-star defensive tackle Kevin Wynn, who played just eight snaps against the Aggies.
The No. 60 overall player in the country appeared in four games, redshirting in 2025, then featured in a limited role to start 2026. After losing 40 pounds this offseason to get down to 317 pounds, Wynn was on a limited snap count, and while that’s not ideal, defensive coordinator Tony White explained that there’s a plan to ramp him up.
“He’s a guy who lost a lot of weight, put himself in a position to start playing,” White told reporters in his press conference on Monday. “A lot of those guys it was on a certain snap count deal.”
Florida State needs its blue-chip talent to tip the scales in 2026
The margins in the ACC are razor-thin. Florida State, which lost four consecutive conference games by one score last season, knows that well. And, after that 5-7 season, with the possibility of paying Norvell’s near-$50 million buyout at some point this fall, the Seminoles opted not to be a big spender in the transfer portal, so Norvell needs to get something out of the blue-chip talent that is on the roster.
That’s not just true blue-chip recruits like Wynn and Kromah; it’s players like the Desir twins and Ja’Bril Rawls who all entered the transfer portal this offseason before, presumably, being enticed to return with a significant NIL package.
The Desirs were underwhelming in Week 1, recording just one quarterback pressure each, and Rawls struggled mightily, especially compared to his status as a likely 2026 NFL Draft prospect. Still, at least that group played. Wynn was limited to just eight snaps and had little impact on a defensive line that held New Mexico State to a 36% rushing success rate.
Last season, New Mexico State ranked No. 128 in the FBS in rushing success rate, so the Seminoles didn’t exactly need to allocate additional resources to stifling the ground game or put extra tread on Wynn’s tires early in the year.
The Kevin Wynn breakout is still on the table
This offseason, after Wynn shed those 40 pounds, defensive line coach Terrence Knighton told Warchant, “He’s moving well, which is helping his body with the day-to-day. Now, he’s able to, like I said, focus on football. He’s in great shape, and he’s ready to show he can be an every-down player.”
That comment isn’t looking very prescient after Week 0. But if White is simply being careful with his young defensive line talent against one of the worst run games in the country, with SMU and Alabama on deck, there’s still some hope that even if he isn’t an every-down player, he can have an outsized impact in a limited workload.
FSU will likely need some level of impact from him this season because its primary interior defensive linemen from Week 0, Daniel Lyons, Mandrell Desir, Deante McCray, and Deamontae Diggs, are all south of 300 pounds. Against NMSU, you can live without a true nose on the field, but against Power Conference competition, that’s going to be more difficult. So, 6-foot-2, 317-pound Wynn and 6-foot-4, 310-pound Sanders, who was also limited, will be a larger part of the game plan.
Unless this is White covering for a young player, it doesn’t sound as though it’s performance-related. Ideally, he’d have been ready to go for Week 0, but at least FSU isn’t simply saying Wynn isn’t good enough to see the field; that would have been the worst-case scenario.
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