Florida’s Governor is weighing in on the upcoming Florida-Georgia football game, and even his taxpayer-funded campaign against Amendment 4 isn’t shielded from football observations.
Speaking at a Catholic church in Jacksonville along with Florida Physicians Against Amendment 4, Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested the Gators don’t have a shot against the Bulldogs during the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”
“I’m not sure I’d put my money on the Gators on this one, but you never know, right?” DeSantis said, continuing his tradition of casting aspersions on the on-field performance of public university teams in the state, and effectively reprising comments he made ahead of last year’s neutral site game in Jacksonville between the two teams.
“I will say, as somebody who was born and raised in Florida, the Florida-Georgia game was a little easier lift for us back in the day than it is now. And you Georgians know what I mean,” DeSantis said during an August 2023 campaign stop in the Peach State.
“We’ve done better on almost everything policywise. I can point out many things. College football has not necessarily been one of them. So we’re trying to turn the corner,” DeSantis added.
DeSantis similarly dismissed Billy Napier’s squad during September 2023 comments to the California Republican Party. He said he needed “their football team to start doing a little bit better.”
It’s not just Gainesville taking heat. It’s also Tallahassee, where Mike Norvell is having a down year.
Even as DeSantis, who played baseball at Yale when in college, lauded Florida State University and the University of Miami by winning the “war on woke” by defeating Cal-Berkeley this year, DeSantis noted his son Mason, aged 6, was “really struggling” with the Seminoles’ subpar performance thus far in 2024.
The Governor has triangulated between the Gators and Seminoles, including during last year’s presidential campaign when he boosted his prospects with a selection of boots, saying his choice of footwear gives him a lift during the UF rivalry with the Florida State Seminoles as a way to “please both sides.”
“In Florida we have some rivalries with college football,” DeSantis explained. “So these are authentic Florida Gator boots. Now, the good thing about these is that Florida Gator fans love it because it’s the Gators. But, you know, Seminole fans also like it because someone had to kill a Gator to make those boots.”
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