Boston College gets Florida State at exactly the kind of moment that can fool a team if it lets its guard down.
The Eagles will host the Seminoles in a Week 10 ACC matchup on Saturday in Chestnut Hill, Mass., with kickoff set for 12:00 p.m. ET.
Boston College enters at 4-4 overall and 2-3 in conference play, carrying the same uneven season it has had all year. Florida State arrives at 3-5 and 1-4 in the ACC, but the record only tells part of the story.
The Seminoles are dealing with a major reset after the dismissal of former head coach Mike Norvell following last weekend’s 36-24 loss to Clemson. Rick Stockstill will step in as interim head coach after working as Florida State’s director of scouting for offense since the start of the 2024 season. Before that, he spent 18 years as the head coach at Middle Tennessee State and finished with a 113-111 record.
“It’s tough,” BC head coach Bill O’Brien said of Florida State’s leadership change. “I think Mike Norvell is a great football coach.
I mean, he went 13-0, you know what I mean? I think it’s hard to do that man.
But that’s the way it is. We all know what we sign up for.”
“Rick Stockstill is a great coach. I’ve known him for a long time.
Got a lot of respect for him. We’re just going to prepare for what we see on film.”
Florida State also took another hit when wide receiver Duce Robinson suffered a season-ending ACL tear, a development announced right after O’Brien’s press conference ended following Tuesday’s practice.
Robinson had been the Seminoles’ top receiver, leading the team with 438 receiving yards and four touchdowns on 24 catches. The 6-foot-6, 230-pound wideout averaged 18.3 yards per reception and had two 100-yard games through eight contests. After earning First-Team All-ACC and Third-Team All-American honors from Phil Steele as a junior in 2025, he could have entered the NFL Draft and likely gone in the first three rounds, but instead returned for his senior season.
His loss comes on top of Florida State already being without running back Ousmane Kromah, who was injured in the Seminoles’ 43-35 double-overtime loss at Miami on Oct. 18.
Kromah left that game with an ankle injury that ended his season. At the time, he was on track for a huge year, with 609 rushing yards and five touchdowns on 114 carries.
Even with all of that swirling around Florida State, Boston College can’t afford to look at this as anything but a full-strength challenge. The temptation to label it a trap game is obvious, especially with the coaching change and the injuries piling up for the Seminoles. But the Eagles know better than to assume the game will take care of itself.
“Gotta treat every week the same,” defensive back Carter Davis said. “Just go into each and every week ready to put in the work no matter if we lost or if we won, so treat it all the same.”
That mindset matters even more for a BC team that has spent the last two weeks collecting mistakes. The Eagles have been flagged 25 times over that stretch, and the bigger battle this week may be against their own sloppiness.
“Yeah, we got to execute better than we did,” running back Bo MacCormack III said. “I mean, we know [that] everybody knows their job.
We just, we all have to do our job better than we did, and we got to continue to work on that, make sure that we get that done this week. We can't have, we can't shoot ourselves in the foot.”
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