A power surge plunged Doak Campbell Stadium into darkness minutes before kickoff Monday night, forcing Florida State and SMU into one of the strangest situations in recent college football memory.
The blackout struck just before the 7:39 p.m. ET kickoff, sending both teams back to their locker rooms and prompting urgent meetings between school administrators, coaches and ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips. For more than an hour, the fate of the game remained uncertain.
The central question was whether the teams could play without power — specifically, without the modern communications infrastructure that college football now depends on. No helmet-to-helmet radio systems. No coordinator-to-coach iPad connectivity. No real-time sideline command centers. Only hand signals and the kind of communication methods football teams used decades ago.
By 8:45 p.m., after multiple rounds of meetings, both schools decided to play.
The decision was driven by logistics as much as necessity. SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee faces a brutal schedule constraint — his team hosts UC Davis on Saturday, leaving no realistic window for postponement. Florida State coach Mike Norvell, already under considerable scrutiny heading into the season, was not eager to delay either. Postponing to Tuesday would have created cascading problems across both programs' schedules.
"There would have been an ample amount of problems," according to sources familiar with the discussions.
But the decision carried genuine risk. Lashlee emphasized that SMU hadn't practiced without coach-to-player communication in over two years. His quarterback would be operating without sideline play-calling for the first time since 2024. For a modern offense built on real-time adjustments, it was a significant disadvantage.
As darkness fell over Tallahassee, stadium officials worked to restore power while coaches huddled with game officials at 9:06 p.m. to drill hand signals — a pre-digital language of football that neither team had seriously used in years.
Fans who remained through the outage kept the energy alive. The Florida State marching band engaged the crowd while games broke out in the stands.
For the coaching staffs, however, this was no novelty. For Norvell, the outcome carried outsized weight given the pressure on his program. For Lashlee and SMU, an unexpected loss without the communication tools his team had built a season around could derail momentum before it starts.
Stadium officials hoped to restore full power by halftime. If not, both teams faced ninety minutes of operations management unlike anything their current rosters had experienced.
FSU and SMU were headed into uncharted waters, armed with nothing but hand signals and hope.
