Sometimes, Florida State president T.K. Wetherell is just too expressive
Indirectly, it's my fault Florida State President T.K. Wetherell's profane slip of tongue denigrated tiny Samford College during his press conference Tuesday in which Wetherell announced the school will appeal a portion of the NCAA sanctions against the Seminoles. (Here's my column in today's Sentinel from Wetherell's press conference)
Here's exactly what happened: Wetherell was in the midst of addressing the perception that football coach Bobby Bowden is hanging around because of the race with Joe Paterno to see who can retire as the winningest coach in major college football history.
Within Wetherell's discussion of the issue, he addressed an item I wrote in my wildly popular "Running off at the typewriter" column in Saturday's Sentinel. That's when I questioned whether the 31 victories Bowden compiled at Division I-AA Howard College (now Samford) early in his career should count on his Division 1-A total.
That's right, it was "Running off at the typewriter" that caused Wetherell to run off at the mouth.
"We’ve heard Bianchi over there saying, well, hell, 31 wins don’t count anyway because they were at some [dipstick] school," Wetherell said.
Of course, Wetherell didn't actually use the word dipstick. He said "dip" but he replaced "stick" with a profane word that is a synonym for manure.
Immediately after the slip of the tongue, Wetherell looked over at Lee Hinkle, FSU's vice president for university relations, and said, "I’m sorry, Lee," Wetherell said. "I got wound up."
First Florida coach Urban Meyer gets criticized for using the s-word in a recent speech in front of high school coaches and now FSU's president drops the s-word on a little Baptist college in Alabama.
I've said it once and I'll say again: As a sportswriter, I love T.K. Wetherell because of his candidness, but in this case he obviously went too far. It's just not good form for one university president to profanely besmirch another university. Especially when that university happens to be Bobby Bowden's alma mater (oops).
To paraphrase former FSU star Peter Warrick: It's not like T.K. Wetherell shot the president, but he certainly needs to publicly apologize for this momentary lapse in judgement.
