A 17-point win that felt narrower
Florida State opened 31.5-point favourites against New Mexico State on Saturday night in Tallahassee. They won 34-17. The Seminoles never trailed for a single snap and still finished 14.5 points on the wrong side of that number, which tells you more about the evening than the final score does.
Ashton Daniels, the Auburn transfer taking his first snaps in garnet and gold, completed 17 of 27 for 202 yards with one touchdown and one interception. Ousmane Kromah carried the running game with 115 yards and a score. Florida State ended with a 419-319 edge in total yardage, a margin of exactly 100 yards against a team they were expected to bury.
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New Mexico State kept the ball in the air
Trey Hedden was the reason this stayed live into the fourth quarter. The Aggies quarterback went 26 of 42 for 272 yards and two touchdowns, leaning almost entirely on two targets. TK King caught seven passes for 78 yards and a score. Brodie Malone-Bradford added six receptions for 96 yards and a touchdown of his own.
The ground game gave Hedden nothing. New Mexico State ran 23 times for 47 yards, an average of barely two yards a carry, which left them one-dimensional and still within 17-10 midway through the third quarter after Ilya Uvaydov’s 38-yard field goal.
Discipline hurt them too. Eight penalties for 68 yards against seven for 65 for the hosts. On a night when the Aggies needed every drive to count, they gave away close to a full field of yardage.
How Florida State finally pulled clear
Gabe Panikowski opened the scoring with a 43-yard field goal at 3:05 of the first quarter. Daniels ran in from the 4 early in the second, then found Samuel Singleton Jr. from 4 yards out to make it 17-7 at the break.
Singleton scored again from the 2 in the third. Panikowski’s 41-yard kick with 10:41 left pushed the lead to three scores, Hedden and King answered with a 34-yard strike, and Kromah’s 1-yard run with 4:01 remaining finally closed it out.
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