Florida State’s 2024 season is an abject disaster.
The No. 10 Seminoles are now 0-2 after a 28-13 home loss to Boston College on Monday night. The Eagles ran over and through the Florida State defense for 268 yards while Florida State’s offense with new quarterback DJ Uiagalelei was underwhelming for a second straight week.
FSU got the ball to start the second half after Boston College built a 14-6 lead. It appeared to be a key moment for the Seminoles to drive down the field and either close the gap to one or tie the game.
Instead, Uiagalelei threw a desperate interception on fourth down. The ball was picked off by Max Tucker and returned to the FSU 7 yard-line. Two plays later, Boston College had a 15-point lead.
Florida State showed some life minutes later and pulled within eight after a trick play set up a 29-yard TD pass to Kentron Poitier. But FSU’s defense continued to get picked apart by Boston College’s run game. The Eagles responded to FSU’s first TD of the night — and the school’s first passing TD since the fateful North Alabama game in 2023 — with an eight-play drive that took over four minutes.
The Seminoles couldn’t respond. Uiagalelei hit Poitier for another big gain on FSU’s next drive, but the QB was called for intentional grounding on the very next play and Florida State ended up turning the ball over on downs.
Heck, things were so bad for Florida State that it punted to Boston College with just over six minutes to go while trailing by 15 because the Seminoles were facing a fourth-and-20 after offensive lineman TJ Ferguson drew an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for this shove that drew a celebratory dance from Boston College’s Neto Okpala.
Oh, Florida State never got the ball back after the punt, either.
What the heck is going on at FSU?
It’s hard to identify what’s going right for the Seminoles at this point. They were all out of sorts again on Monday night. Uiagaelei was consistently pressured. He was inaccurate at times. His receivers dropped catchable passes when he was accurate. The run game hardly existed. The defensive line got worked. The linebackers were in a blender. The Seminoles committed seven penalties while Boston College committed one. The list goes on and on.
It was easy to write off the Week 0 Georgia Tech loss in Dublin as an aberration. Teams with lots of new faces sometimes struggle in the first game of the season and long-distance travel can wreak havoc. However, many of the themes that blossomed against the Yellow Jackets continued against Boston College. Florida State is a deeply flawed football team at the moment.
The joy of the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff is that it gives teams who started the season poorly a chance to play for the national title if they improve as the season goes on. But this is no normal 0-2 start. Florida State is the fourth team in the past decade to start the season 0-2 after being ranked in the top 10 of the preseason AP Top 25. And both of those losses are conference losses.
For most teams, an 0-2 start doesn’t have much impact on the conference race. Thanks to a unique schedule, Florida State now needs to make up ground against the other 17 teams in the ACC to simply make the conference title game and have a chance at the playoff.
Do you trust Florida State to do that right now? We certainly don’t. And we’re one of the many who had FSU as the preseason ACC champion and among the teams in the 12-team postseason.
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What a start for Bill O’Brien at Boston College
Boston College already has a signature win in the Bill O’Brien era. The former Houston Texans head coach and Alabama offensive coordinator was hired as the Eagles’ head coach earlier this year after Jeff Hafley left to become the defensive coordinator for the Green Bay Packers.
O’Brien was in his bag early against the Seminoles as BC gained chunks of yardage on creative play calls. But the most obvious way the Eagles beat Florida State was on the offensive and defensive lines.
“We won the game up front, we established the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball,” O’Brien said on “SportsCenter” after the game.
The play on the lines is a huge positive for a Boston College team looking for its first eight-win season since 2009. The Eagles were picked in the bottom half of the ACC entering the season and play No. 11 Missouri and Michigan State in Weeks 3 and 4 following a game against FCS opponent Duquesne on Saturday. Given what we saw on Monday night, don’t be surprised if Boston College hangs with Missouri for a while and takes down Michigan State.