Florida State will open its ACC schedule on Labor Day evening by hosting No. 19 SMU at Doak Campbell Stadium, and the Seminoles are the underdog at home. The Week 1 matchup in the 2026 college football season is set for 7:30 p.m. and will be televised and streamed by.
That is why the Smu Vs Florida State prediction search is getting attention now: the game is not just a season opener, but a rare second meeting between the programs with a ranked opponent walking into Tallahassee. Florida State enters at 1-0 and 0-0 in the ACC, while SMU arrives 0-0 after a 2025 season in which it went 6-2 in the conference and beat 10th-ranked Miami.
The first meeting came in 2024, when SMU beat Florida State 42-16 in Dallas. Kevin Jennings drove that win, completing 16 of 23 passes for 254 yards and three touchdowns, and he returns as SMU’s third-year starting quarterback. He also reportedly recovered from an injured index finger on his throwing hand after missing two weeks of fall camp because of a locker room incident, a reminder that the player most central to this matchup has already had a disrupted run-up to the season.
SMU has spent its first two ACC seasons building a record that makes this trip harder than a typical opener. Rhett Lashlee is in his fifth year as head coach and has a 38-16 overall mark at SMU, while the program has gone 14-2 in league play across those first two ACC seasons and reached the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff as the 11th seed in 2024. Lashlee also kept Casey Woods and Scott Symons in place when he took over before the 2022 season, giving SMU continuity on both sides of the ball.
Florida State, though, is not walking into this as a finished product. It comes off a 34-17 win over New Mexico State as a 31-point favorite, and that game was tighter than the final margin suggested when Florida State led 17-10 in the third quarter before pulling away late. This one is different, because the Seminoles are trying to answer for a defense that has to account for Jennings again while being asked to start conference play against a team that has already shown it can travel and punish mistakes.
SMU’s offense is also changing around Jennings. It is replacing its top two running backs, four of its top receivers and two offensive linemen, although PJ Williams, Joshua Bates and Addison Nichols are back up front, with Williams a second-team All-ACC left tackle and Bates an honorable mention center on the Rimington Trophy Watchlist. The defense has more turnover, too, with the line and secondary hit hard, even as SMU added experienced portal transfers and returns three starting linebackers led by Alexander Kilgore.
The bottom line is that Florida State’s opener carries more weight than a normal first game because it starts the ACC slate, comes on a national stage and still leaves the Seminoles needing a cleaner answer to the same quarterback who beat them by 26 points two years ago. If Florida State is going to make the home underdog label look wrong, it has to contain Jennings early and avoid giving SMU another fast script in Tallahassee.
