Athlon Sports assesses Mike Norvell's hot seat temperature entering 2025

You don’t see too many, if any, coaches on a hot seat who are recently coming off an undefeated season and run at the College Football Playoff. However, going 2-10 will do that to you, which is where Florida State’s Mike Norvell finds himself.

Athlon Sports named twenty-plus head coaches who could be on varying levels of a hot seat in their season preview ahead of kickoff in college football. Norvell was on it in what’s possibly “a make-or-break year” having cancelled out a 13-1 year in 2023 with that 2-10 one in 2024.

“The Seminoles never recovered from the College Football Playoff snub in 2023, plummeting to a 2-10 mark last season,” they wrote. “High-profile coordinator hires in Gus Malzahn (offense) and Tony White (defense) should be a massive boost to Norvell in what could be a make-or-break year.”

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Again, it’s been well-documented what the past year and a half has been like down in Tallahassee. They were 13-0 (9-0) on December 2nd, 2023 with full expectations that they’d be in the CFP. After the committee left them out of the field the next day, though, Florida State has gone on to lose eleven of their last thirteen games with a 60-point blowout in the Orange Bowl before that disappointing last fall at 2-10 (1-7).

The Seminoles have now put a lot into making sure that doesn’t happen again in what’s now year six for Norvell, having a record of 33-27 (.550) in his tenure there since 2020. That’s with the hires of Malzahn in place of Alex Atkins at OC and White in place of Adam Fuller as DC. They’ve also brought in a Top-35 portal class and a Top-20 recruiting class to replace much of what they’ve lost over the past two offseasons at FSU.

Florida State, though, is most likely to finish somewhere between that wide variance they’ve had from the past two seasons with their record this upcoming season, with Athlon and ESPN each projecting them to finish in seventh in the ACC. They’ll have a fairly difficult schedule, specifically late, that features Alabama, Miami, and Pittsburgh coming to Doak Campbell Stadium in the first half before games at Clemson, versus Virginia Tech, at NC State, and at Florida come in November.

The Seminoles couldn’t be much worse than what they were in the end of 2024. Still, if they aren’t much better in 2025, Norvell could find himself on a hot seat with two successful seasons carrying a lot of the six years of work in total he’ll have done at that point for FSU.