FSU’s football snub has happened before | Letters to the editor

Supporters of Florida State University are justifiably upset with the egregious mistake of leaving its undefeated team out of the college football playoffs.

So were UCF fans in 2017. That year, the UCF Knights had a perfect season, didn’t get an invite, won the non-playoff Peach Bowl and famously declared themselves national champions.

But the biggest injustice goes to tiny Colgate University, whose 1932 football team not only went unbeaten (9-0), but didn’t give up a point the entire season! Back then, there was only one bowl game, the Rose Bowl, which determined the national championship. Two teams, one from the East and one from the West, were selected by a panel of experts. Sound familiar?

Colgate was passed over based on its “strength of schedule,” which prompted sportswriter Grantland Rice’s famous headline in the New York Times: “Undefeated, Untied, Unscored Upon, and UNINVITED!”

The granddaddy of all bowl games produced the granddaddy of all football snubs. Pitt was the eastern invitee and lost, 35-0, to Southern Cal on New Year’s Day 1933.

Dick Feinberg, Pompano Beach

The writer is a graduate of Colgate, a liberal arts college in Hamilton, N.Y.

The real steal

If Florida residents Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump really wanted to “stop the steal”, they would have stepped in to save FSU — the state’s undefeated champion.

James Wilson, Plantation

Judge not, lest ye …

It appears a bit surreal that Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Zeigler and his wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, have acknowledged involvement in a threesome with a woman who’s accusing Mr. Zeigler of rape. It’s a bit ironic that while the books that Mrs. Zeigler sought to ban sat idly on library shelves, waiting for someone to seek them out, she and her husband willfully indulged in such scandalous behavior that now appears in the printed media and on TV news channels — exposure that has brought shame to them, ridicule to their hypocritical bans on books and more trauma to their children than words or pictures in a book ever could.

It’s a sad reminder of those who seek to judge without being judged and proof once again, as with Jan. 6,  2021, that if such people are not seen for who they are they will undermine every liberty and right that we take for granted to suit their thirst for power.

Steve Talercio, Hallandale Beach

Watching over Bezos’ boat

I was enjoying life, driving my rental boat down the Intracoastal Waterway to Dania Beach, cruise ship-spotting at Port Everglades, when I saw Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos’ megayacht docked next to a cruise boat.

I thought I would get closer, after seeing the cruise ships, six of them, to get a good peek at the three-masted schooner docked among them and a tanker. I was puzzled why Bezos’ boat was there, as big yachts normally dock at Bahia Mar or near the 17th Street Causeway bridge. As I edged closer, a police boat warned me off, saying it was a federal exclusion zone. I went on my way. I checked my charts, saw no federal zone marked, and no signs posted on buoys, but I left. What puzzled me: The boat was flying a Caribbean island flag of registry (Cayman Islands, according to multiple reports).

So an American of great wealth comes to Port Everglades in his custom-made toy flying a foreign flag of registry, possibly to avoid paying American taxes, docks it at a government-owned terminal and has a Fort Lauderdale police boat watching over it to make sure none of us comes too close. The irony! I saw the news article in the Sun Sentinel the next day and how it went on about this great expensive toy Bezos had built, being watched over by police paid with our tax money.

Joseph Schvimmer, Tamarac