Florida State notches first road win in more than 1,000 days
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Florida State has hit a rough patch, in general and this season, and it led to last Sunday’s firing of head coach Mike Norvell.
But as much as the Seminoles have struggled on the field in recent years, wherever they’ve played, they’ve really hit the skids on the road, where they hadn’t won in a very long time.
Coming into Saturday afternoon’s ACC matchup at Boston College, it had been almost 3 years since Florida State won a road game, which would have unthinkable back in the glory days of Bobby Bowden. But that was the reality heading into Week 10, with Norvell being fired 6 days earlier and Rick Stockstill taking over as interim head coach.
So, pardon the Noles if they might have celebrated Saturday’s 31-24 victory at BC a little more wildly than a typical early November win over an Eagles team that was 4-4 coming in.
Not only was it a victory for Stockstill in his FSU coaching debut in place of Norvell. It was also the Seminoles’ first road win since Nov. 25, 2023, when they won at Florida. Gone was the 12-game road losing streak that Florida State came into Saturday with, as FSU was a winner on the road for the first time in exactly 1,078 days.
Florida State improved to 4-5 overall and 2-4 in the ACC with the victory, and its hopes for a winning season were still alive and well.
But what wasn’t alive anymore was that road losing streak that had stretched nearly 3 full years, as Stockstill and the Seminoles danced out of Massachusetts with that elusive road win.
The Noles had to rally to get that road win, scoring 10 points in the fourth quarter to overcome a 24-21 deficit, but they did whatever it took to be able to celebrate on a trip home to Tallahassee — at long last.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
