Florida State vs. Notre Dame: Preview, kickoff time

Florida State Seminoles football, fresh off of its first win of the season against Jacksonville State, is scheduled to head to Indiana to take on Notre Dame in FSU’s second trip to South Bend since the Fighting Irish joined in the ACC on an conditional basis — and first since the Irish became an actual, full-fledged member (if that remains is to be seen.)

The last time the two schools met was in 2018, when a 4-5 Florida State team lost 42-13 in Willie Taggart’s first season — before that, it was in 2014, when a last-second offensive pass interference penalty negated what would’ve been a game-winning touchdown for Notre Dame against the defending national champions at home.

The kickoff time between the two schools was announced before the season started, coupled with the announcement of FSU’s kickoff time against Georgia Tech — 7 p.m. on NBC.

Brian Kelly was complimentary of FSU during his Monday press conference:

“As many of you know, Mike Norvell is the new head coach and have a lot of respect for Mike and what he’s accomplished. And you know, again, I’ve known Mike and followed him and loved what he’s been able to do at Memphis and Arizona State as a coordinator. And in very short order, he’ll have Florida State back in a very good position nationally. But they did some really good things this past weekend. Again, Florida State is very talented. It’s getting to the point where it seems as though they’ve found their quarterback and Jordan Travis. We’ll prepare for a couple of other quarterbacks. We know well, very well, about James Blackman. We’ve faced him as well, but look like they’ve gotten some energy from Travis. Outstanding running backs, talented wide receivers. And so, we know the challenges that we’re going to face with this offense. You know, again, I think (Tamorrion) Terry and (Ontaria) Wilson, two outstanding wide receivers, all of them are big play kind of players. I think from a defensive standpoint, I think if you look at this team, overall, there’s probably six, seven, first-day draft picks. You know, (Joshua) Kaindoh, (Marvin) Wilson, (Amari) Gainer, (Asante) Samuel (Jr.), you know, the safety, who’s been out for a couple of weeks, certainly, is a big time player. So, very talented on defense as well. And, you know, they played some different defenses over the last couple years so they’re starting to get more accustomed to the system that they’re playing. So, a lot of respect for the talent that we’re going to see. And again, we’re coming off a long layoff and we’re going to have to be at our very best and get off to a really good start, we didn’t get off to a good start in our opener against Duke, and it factored into the game. We got off to a great start against South Florida and it did factor into the game. And we’ll need to get off to a good start against Florida State. So, with that, we’ll open it up to questions.”

“I think there’s six maybe seven first-day draft picks. Very talented football team. You know, they needed to find their identity offensively. I think they have found somebody that they feel comfortable with from an offensive standpoint at the quarterback position. Now that kind of allows them to get into a rhythm offensively. Defensively, they were in three down and four down. Maybe they have found where they want to be there as well. So yeah, this is a team that will continue to get better from week-to-week. It’s an established head coach, one that’s been successful, knows what he’s doing, knows what he wants. And Mike will get this football team playing better football. I just hope it’s not this weekend.”