Last week, we watched Florida State get robbed by the College Football Playoff (CFP) committee when the Seminoles were excluded from the playoffs in favor of Alabama.
And contrary to what most college football analysts said (outside of Booger McFarland) on ESPN, which is the CFP’s exclusive media partner, FSU was definitely robbed. That was verified when CFP chair Boo Corrigan admitted on ESPN that the CFP was about TV ratings and matchups, not performance or record.
“Florida State is a different team than they were through the first 11 weeks,” said Corrigan. “Coach Norvell, their players, their fans…an incredible season. But as you look at who they are as a team right now without Jordan Travis, without the offensive dynamic that he brings to it, they are a different team, the committee voted Alabama four and Florida State five.”
Afterward, the a fusillade of debates erupted regarding Alabama leapfrogging the undefeated ACC Champion Seminoles.
After some time, politics waded into the controversy (what happened to “stick to sports”?) when Florida Senator Rick Scott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to chime in.
In an op-ed for the Tallahassee Democrat, Scott railed against the CFP and called for transparency by Corrigan and the committee.
“Until we have transparency, the justified perception of an unfair system will prevail: that the committee has wrongly disregarded the known strengths of an undefeated team over the speculated impact of losing a single player,” wrote Scott. “That’s another diversion from the precedent set by the committee in previous years.”
DeSantis took things a step further by allocating $1 million in his proposed state budget for Florida State to pursue legal action against the CFP.
“My first-grader, my fifth-grader and my preschooler … they are all ‘noles and they are big-time fans and they do the tomahawk chop and they were not happy,” said DeSantis. “We are going to set aside $1 million and let the chips fall where they may.”
Aside from this being ridiculous as any legal action would be laughed into submission before it even reached a courthouse, it shows the hypocrisy of the fascist governor who has crafted Florida into a divisive, whitewashed and unsafe haven for anyone not of his ilk.
DeSantis, an avid anti-DEI, critical thinking, freedom of press and information, civil rights and basic humanity crusader, has waged a cultural war against anything non-Aryan. He even referenced “the tomahawk chop” to further show he doesn’t care about his openly racist thoughts and policies.
This is the dictator who championed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the “Stop WOKE Act” and used his “Freedom from Inodctrination” movement to block an African American AP course from being taught in Florida’s public schools. DeSantis instituted a book ban not seen since the days of Nazi Germany and demanded that state colleges and universities eliminate all CRT and DEI-related budgets, which totaled $34.5 million across the 12 state public universities.
As a result, the University of Florida was forced to cut its spend of $5.3 million ($3.4 million of which was state funded), or .14% of its total budget, on multiple courses including “Impact of Disabilities”. The University of South Florida cut its $4.12 million spend on Upward Bound, a federally funded program dedicated to helping low income high school students and first-generation college students pursue their education.
And let’s not forget that the state continues to deny HBCU institution Florida A&M $1.973 billion in land-grant funding that its been rightfully owed for the last 33 years.
But an unjust decision in college football emerges and a frivolous, politically motivated $1 million gets allocated to a pursuit that will bear no fruit. That’s a slap to the face of everyone in the state suffering from his authoritarian regime, especially educators and Black people.
Seeing the hypocrisy of injecting politics into sports by a group who has mandated that politics stay out of sports is another reason for people to take action and get these hypocrites out of office so that real problems can be addressed by real people with real solutions.
And while Florida State was robbed, that’s not one of those real problems.
