The special teams for Florida State football have been a major disappointment in the Mike Norvell era, aside from a couple of individual efforts here and there. FSU special teams coach John Papuchis accepted an assistant coaching job at Missouri, leaving a void that needed to be filled.

FSU officially announced the hire of Adam Scheier, an experienced and productive special teams coach. He has coached at several places with success.  

Florida State has announced UNLV’s Adam Scheier to be its new special teams coordinator.

Scheier has spent 25 years as a special teams coordinator at schools, such as UNLV, Temple, Rutgers, Miss State, Texas Tech, Ohio State, Wake Forest, Bowling Green, Lehigh, and Princeton. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/enWGN5uiBW

— Norvell Central (@CentralNorvell) January 12, 2026

FSU is a place where special teams should always have electric playmakers. The days of players like Deion Sanders, Peter Warrick,  Kermit Whitfield, Greg Reid, and others making game-changing plays seem so long ago.

Special Teams have largely been a failure at FSU since Mike Norvell placed such high emphasis on that unit in his introductory press conference in December 2019

Special teams can play a vital role in the success of a college football program. The ability to change field position with a huge punt or kickoff return or make a long field goal(or field goal consistently for that matter) can be the difference in winning and losing games.

That has been missing at FSU, and frankly, special teams have COST FSU wins over the past few years. The inability to field a punt and make a productive punt return has been nonexistent, except in the year Keon Coleman took it upon himself to return punts.

Scheier’s special team units have produced wherever he’s been for the most part, and FSU should have enough talent on the roster to create explosive plays consistently with good coaching.

Micahi Danzy and Sam Singleton have the potential to be explosive kick returners. We’ll see what happens at punt returner. FSU is in need of a field goal kicker since Jake Weinberg entered the portal. We’ll see if this new coach has connections to get someone FSU can trust in 2026.