Listen, if you can’t figure out why UF has three football national championships and zero Nobel Prize winners, you haven’t been paying attention.
It surely must say something about our screwed up priorities that getting rid of UF’s arguably most incompetent president ever (and certainly the shortest serving) cost what amounted to pocket change…
…while buying off UF’s arguably most haplesss football coach ever is going to require a king’s ransom.
Yeah, we’re going to continue to pay the late unlamented UF President Ben Sasse his $1 million a year salary through 2028. Plus health insurance of course.
Presumably as a token of our gratitude for his doing the decent thing and resigning.
But BUYING OUT Billy Napier will reportedly require somewhere in the (very pricy) neighborhood of $26.7 million.
Don’t get me wrong. Despite his losing record Napier was a better football coach than Sasse was a president.
But, seriously, what price football glory?
How many hundreds of millions of dollars must Gator Nation continue to throw away – year after year, coach after coach, NIL deal after NIL deal – on the off-chance that maybe, one day, there will be another national championship down the road?
Or maybe not.
The protestations of the David Whitleys of this world notwithstanding, I would argue that a really really good university president – a Robert Quarrels Marston, just to pick a name out of UF’s line of presidents – ought to be worth his or her weight in gold.
At least that would be so in a rational society.
I was editor of the Independent Florida Alligator when Marston was hired, back in the mid-1970s. And I went on to cover his administration as higher education reporter for The Sun.
For my money, Marston – hired in the full light of Sunshine BTW – did more to elevate UF’s national status and reputation than any president before or since.
In contrast, Sasse was picked in secret by political hacks. And as far as I can tell, he had just one marching order: Declare war on wokeness on campus.
That meant stomping on academic freedom, drawing up secret plans to quash the liberal arts, arresting student protestors, killing DEI and otherwise serving as The Great DeSanitizer’s academic sock puppet.
I guess you could say that UF’s Board of Trustees got exactly what they paid for in Sasse. That he could be bought off so cheaply – as opposed to Napier – is simply a damning indictment of just how little we value academic excellence in our Free State of Floriduh.
But Napier? Listen, if we want to snag a Lane Kiffin or a Jed Fisch or (be still my beating heart) lure back Urban Meyer we are gonna have to pay through the nose for the privilege.
After which, of course, we will grant the next coach who promises to deliver us to the National Championship Promised Land a buy out that will equal or exceed Napier’s.
National championships: 3
Nobel Prize winners: 0
You do the math.
FreeGNV 