Notre Dame to Add Florida State to 2014 Schedule?

Last week rumors started to circulate that Notre Dame was looking to dump Arizona State from the 2014 schedule. This week more rumors are flying that the Irish are looking to add a trip to Tallahassee to take on Florida State in place of it’s trip to Tempe.

According to Warchant.com – the Florida State Rivals site – Notre Dame will travel to Tallahassee early in the 2014 season to take on the Seminoles.

A date for the FSU-ND game could not be confirmed, but one source told Warchant.com that FSU and the ACC are clearing the deck to play the game early in the season. The plan is to move up FSU’s game with The Citadel – currently scheduled for Sept. 13 – to Sept. 6, the week following the season opener with Oklahoma State. Spacing out the marquee out of conference games sets up the potential to play the FSU-Notre Dame game in September.

With Notre Dame’s early move to ACC in all sports other than football, the Irish will need to ramp up the football schedule as well to accomodate the 5 ACC games a year that they agreed to play as part of their move to the conference.

Last week’s news of the likely cancelation o the 2014 date with Arizona State paved the way for Notre Dame to add another ACC tilt – now their third for the 2014 schedule to go along with Pitt and Syracuse.

Notre Dame will still need to do some shuffling of it’s 2014 schedule in order to accomodate all of the ACC games, but as of now the Irish will have marquee games of USC, Michigan, and now Florida State.  In looking at the current slate of games, the only other games outside of tradition rivals that Notre Dame won’t want to lose are Rice, Temple, and Northwestern although as of now there hasn’t been any news of any other cancelations.

Notre Dame also currently has open dates of September 20, October 18, and November 22 with 11 games (including FSU and excluding ASU) on tap.  Notre Dame could add another game without canceling any other games.  The most likely date for a new game would be that September 20 open date since they will likely want to keep an open weekend around midterms and will have a tough time finding an ACC opponent at the end of the season given their conference schedule.

The last time Notre Dame made the trip to Tallahassee was 2002 when Tyrone Willingham led the Irish to their 8th straight win to start the season against the Seminoles before losing the following week to Boston College.  The two most recently played, however, just two years ago in the Champs Sports Bowl – a game in which Florida State beat Notre Dame after the Irish looked like they were heading towards an easy victory early on.

An end of October trip to Tempe would have been a welcomed sight for the team right around that time of year when the weather starts to turn cold in South Bend, but from a fan’s perspective, the first road trip to Tallahassee in over a decade isn’t too bad.  Florida State was one of the programs we mentioned as looking forward to playing once it was announced that the Irish would be playing 5 ACC opponents a year.

There is bound to be more changes to the 2014 schedule given the new agreement with the ACC so stay tuned as Kevin White looks to look down next year’s schedule.