After undefeated season, Ron DeSantis enthuses about Florida State football

Image via Colin Hackley.

Florida’s Governor has nothing but kind words to say about the state’s best college football team now that they’re 12-0.

During an interview Wednesday on WFEA’s Morning Update with Drew Cline, Ron DeSantis raved about the Florida State Seminoles, expressing hopes that the squad can win the Atlantic Coast Conference Championship and then proceed to the college football playoffs.

“I’ll tell you what, as Governor, I’m neutral,” DeSantis said. “But my kids… because we’re in Tallahassee, they are big time Nole fans, and we were all watching the game on TV. We thought about going to Gainesville, but we’re like, ‘you know what, we’ve been traveling so much.’ So we watched it.”

“It didn’t start out well for the Noles, but it’s the first time in a long time that a state of Florida team has competed for a national championship. And so if they win the conference championship this weekend, which hopefully they will, they’ll be in the college football playoff. And we’ve actually never had a team in the college football playoff since the playoffs started. Fast forward, rewind when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was like a Florida team was competing for the national title almost every year,” DeSantis recounted.

The Governor has bet his boots on the claim of his neutrality in the intra-state football feud — literally, explaining to the Heritage Foundation why he was wearing “authentic Florida Gator boots” to “please both sides.”

“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,” DeSantis told a crowd at the Heritage Foundation. “So that’s the only way I found to be able to please both sides.”

The narrative of the DeSantis children’s interest in FSU football has been a recurring talking point on the presidential campaign trail. The Governor joked earlier this month about son Mason’s consternation that Siri claimed the FSU game against North Alabama was a toss-up in terms of betting odds.

And the Governor has worked FSU football into his comments about opponents, likening the undefeated Seminoles to Donald Trump in an attempt to cajole the former President into a debate.

In October, DeSantis told Fox News viewers that just as FSU has to finish its season to be national champions, so too does Trump have to “earn” the 2024 Republican nomination.

“I could say, you know, Florida State, they’re undefeated right now. Why even have the rest of the season? Why even do the college football playoffs? I mean, maybe we should just crown the national champion. That’s not the way it works. You got to earn this,” DeSantis said on “Your World with Neil Cavuto.”