Mike Norvell Tops College Football Hot Seat List for the Second Straight Year
Mike Norvell is running out of room at Florida State. ESPN’s “way-too-early” hot seat list places him at the top for the second straight year, and the pressure is not going anywhere.
The story is brutal because it followed an early-season high. FSU opened 2025 with a season-defining win over Alabama and started 3-0. Then everything fell apart. The Seminoles dropped their first four ACC games and finished 5-7, missing a bowl game for the second straight season.
That is the kind of collapse that gets head coaches fired at programs with less history than Florida State. Norvell is still standing because of how things played out in 2023, when he led the Seminoles to a 13-0 regular season and an undefeated ACC championship that should have put them in the College Football Playoff. The CFP committee snubbed them, the program had a meltdown, and the bottom has not fully stopped falling since.
The 2024 season was a 2-10 disaster. The 2025 season was a 5-7 disaster. That is a 7-19 record over two years at a program that expects to be playing for ACC titles every fall.
The Florida State athletic department made changes during the offseason. The coaching staff was reshuffled with new coordinator hires, the roster was rebuilt through the transfer portal, and Norvell has been very vocal publicly about the program’s standards. The recruiting class for 2027 has shown signs of life.
None of that matters if the on-field results do not show up in the fall.
Luke Fickell at Wisconsin is also on the hot seat list. He fell from 17th to 40th in coaching rankings last year after a 5-7 season. Another losing year drops him another eight spots. Wisconsin is supposed to be a stable, winning program. Fickell’s tenure has been the opposite.
Brent Venables at Oklahoma is the inverse story. He climbed 24 spots in coach rankings after taking Oklahoma to the College Football Playoff last year. Venables is one of only four coaches who reached the CFP last year but did not crack the top 25 in the rankings. That gap between results and reputation is closing fast.
The really interesting case is Lane Kiffin at LSU. Kiffin took the LSU job in the offseason after one of the most successful runs of his career at Ole Miss. The expectation in Baton Rouge is the College Football Playoff. CBS Sports’ framing of “first-year success” for Kiffin defines it as CFP or bust. That is enormous pressure on a coach who has never been in a job this high-profile.
For Norvell, the math is even simpler. Florida State has to make a bowl. The Seminoles need to be the back end of the ACC race at minimum. Anything that looks like another 5-7 or worse means the conversation about a new head coach actually starts to happen.
FSU has the resources to absorb a buyout and start over. They also have a fan base that has watched two miserable seasons and is not in the mood to wait through a third. Norvell is fully aware of that.
The 2026 college football season starts in less than three months. The clock is ticking faster than at any program in the country, and that is the price of being Florida State.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
