TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — — New quarterback Tommy Castellanos led a punishing rushing attack for Florida State with 78 yards and a touchdown as the Seminoles stunned No. 8 Alabama 31-17 on Saturday, ending the Crimson Tide’s streak of 23 straight wins in season openers.

Coming off a 2-10 season, Florida State handed a crushing setback to Alabama, which was viewed as a College Football Playoff contender under second-year coach Kalen DeBoer.

Students and fans swarmed the field at Doak Campbell Stadium to celebrate the upset by the Seminoles, who were 13 1/2-point underdogs according to Sportsbook.

Under new offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn — who spent eight seasons as Auburn’s head coach — Florida State was physical from the start, finishing with 230 rushing yards and averaging 4.7 yards per carry. The Seminoles averaged just 89.9 yards during their disastrous 2024 season.

The Crimson Tide had not dropped a season opener since losing 20-17 to UCLA in 2001 under Dennis Franchione, and this defeat will ratchet up the pressure on DeBoer from the demanding Tuscaloosa faithful. His predecessor, Nick Saban, led Alabama to six national titles.

DeBoer fell to 6-4 against unranked teams at Alabama; Saban went 124-4 in such games.

Alabama couldn’t solve Florida State’s defense, finishing with 87 rushing yards on 29 carries. Florida State halted Alabama three times on fourth down, the final time coming with 5:39 to go.

Castellanos, a Boston College transfer, had 16 carries while no one else had more than seven rushing attempts for the Seminoles. He also completed 9 of 14 passes for 152 yards as Florida State defeated its first ranked opponent since knocking off No. 19 Louisville in the 2023 Atlantic Coast Conference championship game.

Micahi Danzy, Caziah Holmes and Gavin Sawchuk also had rushing touchdowns for Florida State.

Ty Simpson completed 23 of 43 passes for 254 yards and two touchdowns in his Alabama debut. Germie Bernard led Alabama with eight catches for 146 yards.

The takeaway

Alabama: The Crimson Tide scored on an opening drive that went 8 minutes, 50 seconds, but struggled to sustain drives the rest of the afternoon.

Florida State: The Seminoles bounced back on a big stage as coach Mike Norvell began his sixth season by picking up a fifth win over a Southeastern Conference team.

Up next

Alabama hosts Louisiana-Monroe next Saturday.

Florida State hosts East Texas A&M next Saturday.

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One of the biggest nonconference clashes of Week 1 features No. 8 Alabama making its first-ever trip to Tallahassee, Florida, squaring off against a Florida State team that is looking to erase the disappointment of 2024 with a strong performance from a retooled Seminoles roster.

Alabama enters the 2025 with its own bounce-back motivations after last year’s 9-4 finish fell short of expectations for Year 1 under Kalen DeBoer. After inheriting Nick Saban’s program, DeBoer fell just short of the 12-team College Football Playoff in part because of multiple losses as a double-digit favorite. That’s the same favorite status the Crimson Tide carry into this season-opening road tilt, providing a great opportunity for Alabama to start its playoff march by reversing that trend.

For Florida State, there’s a lot at stake in terms of proving that last season’s stunning collapse was just a blip on the radar. After going 13-1 in 2023, Mike Norvell’s team started the season in the top 10 and proceeded to go 2-10. Norvell made new hires at offensive coordinator (Gus Malzahn) and defensive coordinator (Tony White) and brings in a host of transfer talent, including quarterback Tommy Castellanos, to try and flip the script and get the program back on track.

It’s a huge statement spot for both teams in what should be an electric environment in a renovated Doak Campbell Stadium. 

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports provides you with live updates, highlights and analysis as Alabama battles Florida State to open the 2025 season in Week 1. 

Bernie Sanders has joined in on growing public calls for Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to resign, after recent chaos across US health agencies.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Saturday, the Vermont senator accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”

“Mr Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr Kennedy have done exactly the opposite,” Sanders wrote.

Sanders pointed to the White House’s firing of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as four other top CDC officials who resigned in protest this week after Monarez “refused to act as a rubber stamp” for Kennedy’s “dangerous policies”.

“Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts,” Sanders wrote.

“Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are secretary Kennedy’s views? … He has absurdly claimed that ‘there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective’ … Who supports secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading ‘experts’ that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.”

Sanders went on: “The reality is that secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.”

Pointing to what he described as “our broken health care system”, Sanders said that Kennedy’s repeated attacks against science and vaccines will make it more difficult for Americans to obtain lifesaving vaccines.

“Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs – if they can manage to get a vaccine at all,” he wrote.

The senator warned that Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, which involves a list of recommended vaccines for children to protect them from diseases including measles, chickenpox and polio.

“The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm,” Sanders said.

In recent days, the Trump administration has faced rare bipartisan pushback following its firing of Monarez, which came amid steep budget cuts to the CDC’s work as well as growing concerns of political interference.

Meanwhile, Kennedy has continued to make questionable medical and health claims – and has been lambasted in response by experts and lawmakers alike.

Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy – a longtime anti-vaccine advocate – has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.

The health agency workers went on to accuse the health secretary of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information”.

The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick, according to the gunman’s father.