TALLAHASSEE \u2014 Friday nights used to belong to high school football. Those days are long since in the rearview mirror as college conferences have sought non-traditional TV time slots to showcase their teams.<\/p>\n
The ACC has made an intentional push into Friday nights, playing 12 games in 2025 and now a league-record 15 games this fall. No. 4 Miami (5-0, 3-0 ACC) has already played on a pair of Fridays, winning at Stanford and Wake Forest in September.<\/p>\n
Florida State (3-2, 1-1 ACC) now plays the first of three Friday games, traveling to Louisville (2-3, 1-2) on Friday at 7 p.m. (ESPN).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a great showcase,\u201d FSU coach Mike Norvell said. \u201cI don\u2019t love the road, short week games. We got a couple of them this year. We got a great plan to make sure our guys are going to be ready to roll Friday night. But then the benefit of it is the stage, being able to go and be in a very competitive and hostile environment against a great team.\u201d<\/p>\n
Norvell said the key for the Seminoles was their 48-hour turnaround from the end of a 38-7 win over Virginia on Saturday. FSU\u2019s coaches held a \u201ccorrection meeting\u201d on Sunday and had the players lift weights but opted not to practice. While Monday is usually FSU\u2019s off day, the Seminoles instead were on the practice field in the morning.<\/p>\n
The Seminoles will also play a Friday road game against Pittsburgh on Nov. 13 and finish the regular season with a home matchup against Florida on Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving. Doak Campbell Stadium has a number of classrooms, which makes scheduling a home Friday game logistically impossible unless it\u2019s around a holiday weekend.<\/p>\n
FSU, SMU, Louisville and Virginia Tech are among the ACC schools that play three Friday games.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo do it three times in a year is a lot,\u201d Norvell said. \u201cWe came into it understanding some of the things that we have to do creatively with the schedule, make sure we\u2019re doing all things, taking care of guys\u2019 bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Miami-Wake Forest game was ESPN\u2019s highest rated Friday broadcast in 2026 with 2.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen research. Fox has also scheduled Friday games, with Northwestern-Indiana reaching 3.8 million viewers. Missouri-Kansas and Houston-Texas Tech surpassed 3 million viewers.<\/p>\n
Those numbers are favorable for leagues such as the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 to take slots on Fridays. The other is the quantity of games each week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much compression on Saturday,\u201d ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said in July. \u201cEverybody can\u2019t play on Saturday anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
FSU\u2019s ratings have been very strong on Fridays. The FSU-Virginia game in September 2025 drew 4.39 million viewers with a peak viewership of 6.9 million, the most watched ESPN Friday game in nearly three decades, according to Nielsen\u2019s research. The FSU-NC State game in November 2025 drew 2.1 million viewers.<\/p>\n
Even after two losing seasons, FSU\u2019s ratings in 2026 have been good. More than 4 million viewers watched FSU-SMU, which began late on Labor Day after lightning delays and a power outage. The FSU-Alabama game was watched by 7 million viewers with a peak of 8 million, per Nielsen, although that game was also delayed by lightning.<\/p>\n
Daniels honored<\/p>\n
Ashton Daniels has been named the ACC quarterback of the week and Davey O\u2019Brien quarterback of the week. Daniels ran for a career-best 136 yards and five touchdowns while passing for 183 yards against Virginia. His five rushing touchdowns is an FSU record and tied the ACC record for touchdowns by a quarterback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLAHASSEE \u2014 Friday nights used to belong to high school football. Those days are long since in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[111,28,3731,76046,110,232,234,233],"class_list":["post-420583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-college-sports","tag-florida","tag-florida-state-seminoles","tag-social-sports","tag-sports","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}