Florida State pulled off a nifty swinging gate trick play after scoring the 2024 season's first touchdown

The 2024 college football season kicked off on Saturday with a Week 0 clash in Dublin, Ireland between Florida State and Georgia Tech.

And just minutes into the season opener for the sport, trickeration was afoot.

After scoring the first touchdown of the season, FSU lined up in what is widely described as the “swinging gate” formation, a lineup that is often attempted but rarely successful when the offense is trying to catch the defense off-guard. So many things can, and often do, go wrong when an offense trots out this formation.

The advantage of the “swinging gate” – other than being able to surprise the defense with a very unorthodox look – is that it allows the offense a bit of flexibility, in that it can run a play or shift into a different formation and kick a field goal. It also creates a lopsided advantage on one side of the field, where typically all of the other linemen will set up to the way left of the center.

On Saturday, that’s how Florida State came out for its 2-point conversion attempt. And the play, despite it’s odd look, was pretty simple: FSU’s center side-snapped the ball to tight end Brian Courtney, who ran behind a team of blockers and into the endzone.

Here’s the play:

Welcome back, college football, and all of your weird plays and fun formations. Hopefully, this will be the first of many strange and wild occurrences in the season. Like last year, when we saw a long snapper recover his own snap for a touchdown, or Texas running the ball with its defensive linemen, or Army’s 9-minute drive against Syracuse.