College football is back.
After months of roster lawsuits, coaching chatter and playoff arguments nobody asked to relitigate in August, the games have finally started.
North Carolina and TCU opened the FBS season in Dublin. And in Tallahassee, Florida State took care of New Mexico State at Doak Campbell Stadium to keep hope alive for fans hoping to see some improvement from the program.
FSU entered at around a 30-point favorite to begin Mike Norvell’s seventh season, which is another way of saying the opener was supposed to be a palate cleanser after two years and a 7-17 slog.
The win doesn’t guarantee FSU can be competitive in future games against the likes of Alabama, Miami, or the University of Florida. But at least the Seminoles and Norvell aren’t facing a crisis before Labor Day.
The rest of Florida is still warming up for Week 1.
Jon Sumrall’s Gators kick off Sept. 5 against Florida Atlantic in the Swamp. No. 7 Miami, coming off a College Football Playoff title-game appearance, waits until Friday night at Stanford. Both team will also be in the spotlight, with Sumrall showing what he can do in his first year and the Hurricanes dreaming of finishing the season holding the trophy rather than watching from the locker room.
Now, it’s on to our weekly game of winners and losers.
Winners
Honorable mention: David Jolly and other Democrats. For months the Hope Florida grand jury report sat in a sealed envelope at the Leon County Clerk’s Office. CBS Miami obtained it Wednesday, and Democrats wasted no time making clear they intend to make this scandal a piece of their General Election blueprint.
The facts in that presentment are ugly even if you accept the punchline that nobody is getting charged. In case you need catching up, Centene owed Florida about $67 million for overbilling the Healthy Kids program. Florida then sent $10 million of that money outside state control and through the Hope Florida Foundation.
Hope Florida then sent $5 million each to Secure Florida’s Future and Save Our Society From Drugs. Those groups turned around and shipped about $8.5 million to Keep Florida Clean, the committee James Uthmeier chaired while he was still the Governor’s Chief of Staff. The spend was aimed at killing Amendment 3.
Jurors called that trail a “sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.” They said the $10 million was taxpayer money, not a private bonus, and that peeling it out of the settlement was “the original misappropriation.”
They also said they could not charge anyone. Witness after witness had no memory of who made the call to organize this arrangement. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes,” the report said.
More on all of that later.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said the leak was the crime and that the underlying story was a hoax. But Democrats are calling the report “outrageous” and “immoral” and demanding that Uthmeier, now the Attorney General and Ashley Moody, the former Attorney General now serving in the U.S. Senate, resign.
Annette Taddeo used it against Blaise Ingoglia. Angie Nixon threatened Bar complaints. And Jolly said if he wins in November, he will open a new investigation of his own.
It’s unlikely this will be a top winning issue in a state feeling financial constraints more than most, but it may help Democrats make the case that it’s time to change which party runs the Sunshine State.
Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Tampa Bay Rays. After decades of collapsed plans, empty renderings and near-misses on both sides of the bay, the Rays have secured two votes that put a new stadium finally within reach.
The Tampa City Council approved the stadium package 4-3 on Thursday, and Hillsborough County followed Friday with a 5-2 vote on the same core package.
The latest version cut Tampa’s direct hit from $180 million to $80 million, left Hillsborough on the hook for about $796 million, and put roughly $1.37 billion — plus overruns — on the Rays for a $2.36 billion ballpark at Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus.
Council Member Bill Carlson was the swing vote in the city after saying he would kill the old terms. He backed the new ones once Tampa’s money was limited to infrastructure installments the city says it can recoup later from tax growth around the site.
Hillsborough still carries the larger public piece at roughly $796 million, drawn mostly from the Community Investment Tax, tourist development taxes and other county sources, but the county would own the stadium and collect $4 million a year in rent under a 35-year non-relocation agreement.
Critics will keep arguing the public tab is too high. Fair enough. But the last rewrite did shift more construction risk to the club and gave local governments a bigger cut of future tax increment than the earlier draft.
So the Rays got both governments to “yes” on the financing skeleton and kept a 2029 opening date.
Just don’t confuse that with a ribbon-cutting. This franchise has announced ballparks before. But maybe this time, we’ll actually get one.
The biggest winner: Bryan Ávila. Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds spoke at the Freedom Tower on Tuesday to name Ávila as his running mate.
Ávila gives Donalds several benefits as a Hialeah-born Cuban American with 12 years in the Legislature, a clean electoral record and real relationships in the chamber Donalds will need if he wins.
Ávila served as House Speaker Pro Tempore, chaired Senate Finance and Tax, carried the Stop WOKE Act, the first-responder “Halo” buffer zone measure and this year’s data-center bill requiring big power users to cover their own infrastructure costs. He also sponsored the homestead property-tax amendment voters will see in November.
Democrats have tried to hang data centers around Donalds’ neck. Putting the Senator who wrote regulatory language on the ticket could appease some people worried about Donalds’ data center positions.
The politics of the pick are just as obvious. Ávila is a Florida Army National Guard captain from the heart of Miami-Dade’s Cuban vote, and he has been running the campaign’s Latino operation since May.
Even Gov. Ron DeSantis, who sat out the Primary and has not exactly been a Donalds cheerleader, called Ávila a “good dude” and praised his Guard service. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott liked the choice too.
David Jolly waved it off and said the race will still be about Donalds and Donald Trump. Maybe. But if the General Election still runs through Miami-Dade, Donalds just put a homegrown legislator on the ticket. And if the blue wave doesn’t overtake Florida this Fall, Ávila will have a high-profile springboard to launch a future move.
Losers
Dishonorable mention: Katie Strickland. The Hope Florida grand jury talked to 13 witnesses. It reserved a special kind of irritation for the Governor’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff.
Other people in the room said Strickland was in the “meetings and the conversations” around the settlement. Yet she told jurors she had “no recollection” of discussing it with Uthmeier or DeSantis.
She solicited a signature from the Department of Health’s Chief of Staff and then could not remember that conversation either, or who told her to get the signature in the first place.
The panel called her “not credible” and the “least informative” witness it heard.
“Contrary to other witnesses identifying her as a participant in meetings and conversations, she could hardly recall any details or information,” the report said.
Ah, just unlucky, it seems.
She did remember one thing. Asked where the idea of sending the money to Hope Florida had come from, Strickland named Jason Weida (we’ll get to him).
Strickland reported to Uthmeier at the time. She now works as a top aide to CFO Ingoglia.
The grand jury can’t, of course, charge a memory lapse. It can, and did, write down how sus her responses were. And we can all draw our own conclusions about it.
Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Weida. Speaking of Weida, he was Secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration when the Centene agreement was rewritten. He was one of four people who signed it.
His own General Counsel, Andrew Sheeran, told the grand jury that Weida directed him to hold the $10 million for Hope Florida. Weida’s version was that he could not recall who suggested the charity as the recipient and that the $10 million was a “bonus” on top of what taxpayers were owed.
The grand jury didn’t buy the “bonus” line.
“We find that the full Centene settlement was taxpayer reimbursement,” it wrote. “We reject Agency for Healthcare Administration Secretary Jason Weida’s explanation that $10 million was a ‘bonus.’”
Strickland, under oath, said the Hope Florida idea was his.
Weida, though, gosh, he just couldn’t remember.
Weida, of course, now sits in the Governor’s Office as Chief of Staff. DeSantis moved Weida into that job in 2025, after Uthmeier went to the Attorney General’s Office. Sheeran later got a circuit judgeship.
The people put under the brightest spotlight by the grand jury keep getting better titles. Except …
The biggest loser: Casey DeSantis. As of now, it doesn’t look like the law is going to hold anyone responsible for this whole fiasco. But someone had to pay the political bill, and that person was the First Lady.
Hope Florida was her initiative. The foundation that took the Centene money existed to support the program she spent years promoting as a way to get people off public assistance and into churches and charities.
The grand jury did not accuse her of rewriting the settlement or steering the grants. But her name was synonymous with the initiative at the center of this scandal.
And when the news originally broke, it landed on top of a race she was already unlikely to win.
The Governor would have loved to endorse his wife as the perfect candidate to continue his legacy in Tallahassee. One big problem: President Donald Trump had already endorsed Donalds, allowing Donalds to raise money at a clip she couldn’t match.
The Hope Florida stories nly piled on the mountain she would have faced had she entered the GOP Primary. A First Lady with a clean charitable record might have tried to muscle past a Trump-backed Congressman. A First Lady whose signature program was the subject of a House investigation, a grand jury and a year of “where did the $10 million go” stories was not going to.
In the end, she never filed, so Donalds is the nominee.
Uthmeier is Attorney General. Weida is the Governor’s Chief of Staff. Moody is in the Senate.
Everyone else got to keep climbing.
The road ahead for Casey DeSantis, meanwhile, is unclear. And politically, it may no longer exist.
