If Ron DeSantis were a dog, he’d have just humped Donald Trump’s leg into his next job

On Friday afternoon last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis was on hand to kick off President Donald Trump’s Saving College Sports Council to which he was appointed and serves as the Vice Chair.

The Council’s goal is to stabilize college sports by addressing, among other things, issues that have arisen from well-intended name, image and likeness (NIL) policies.

DeSantis’ place on the Council is appropriate. Many credit Florida under DeSantis’ leadership with kicking off the NIL era after he signed legislation in 2023 removing restrictions in Florida — and it’s also a key opportunity for the term-limited Governor, whose relationship with Trump has long soured.

But DeSantis’ performance at the Council’s kickoff was oddly reminiscent of a scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation in which Cousin Eddie, played by Randy Quaid, explains to Chevy Chase’s iconic character Clark Griswold how to best handle his “Mississippi leg hound.”

“If the mood catches him right, he’ll grab your leg and just go to town. You don’t want him around if you’re wearing short pants, if you know what I mean. A word of warning though, if he does lay into ya, it’s best to just let him finish,” Cousin Eddie awkwardly advises.

Enter Friday’s meeting and, well, the mood clearly caught DeSantis right. He grabbed Trump’s leg and just went to town.

“Thank you, Mr. President, for doing this. I mean, you have pedal to the metal on so many different issues, from national security to border to energy, and you’re not taking the pedal off any of that,” DeSantis gushed.

“And you could be forgiven to say college sports is important, but your plate is full, and you just added it to all the other things that you’re doing. And I thank you for that, because this would not get done without your leadership. No one else could get this group together, no one else could work with Congress to be able to do it.”

It was so gushing, in fact, that it makes one wonder whether an aide to the President had to tell Trump to “just let him finish.”

Yet even through the Thanksgiving-sized heaping of praise, DeSantis couldn’t help but to deploy the most unlikeable parts of his public persona, notably his petty whining. In this case, the culprits are college athletes holding their hands out for a portion of the revenue they help generate for their professional … er, college football programs.

“I mean, we know this is out of whack. We went from a system where you couldn’t give a student athlete anything — they could sell your jersey, you get nothing — to now, quarterback throws for 300 yards and they go see the coach — ‘Hey, I need more money. Give me more money,’” DeSantis opined.

Yet despite his equal parts sycophantic and histrionic performance, Florida’s Governor may have just figuratively humped his way to his next job.

Ladies and gentleman, meet Ron DeSantis: College Sports Czar. Huzzah!

As a lame duck, DeSantis’ next steps are unclear at best, sparse at worst. Hell, he doesn’t even have a home to move back to when his time in the Governor’s Mansion is up.

Maybe his moving trucks are D.C.-bound where, instead of merely serving as Vice Chair of the Saving College Sports Council, DeSantis can actually make sense of some of the problems facing college sports, and the athletes who compete in them.

College sports are indeed experiencing a crisis of sustainability, fueled largely by unregulated NIL and the resulting financial deficits, sports betting, and inconsistent regulations across states.

Importantly, DeSantis is uniquely qualified to be the czar of college sports. Think about it. He’s unlikeable, sure, but he’s also effective.

The unlikeable part matters electorally, but it becomes fairly moot in a role such as this. Consider that no one really likes sports Commissioners anyway.

Ask Bud Selig’s haters.

“He was the worst, a poison, a villain. He was the death of baseball, the worst that America had to offer, an amalgam of oligarchy and plutocracy with one finger up its nose and another held upright, pointed at you,” wrote sports columnist Grant Brisbee in 2015.

Or Roger Goodell.

“I’m telling you, it hit me right across the chest and almost knocked me back, it was that powerful. So there was meaning behind that for sure,” the NFL Commissioner said of the first time he got booed at the NFL draft, which has since become a thing.

Sports Commissioners aren’t quite like umpires, in that they’re not necessarily fair or morally righteous. But Commissioners are, like DeSantis, brutally effective.

Commissioners are arguably the least popular people associated with industries that are 100% dependent on public popularity.

Yet they are also the ones who keep games running on time and leagues functioning at optimum efficiency. They enforce discipline and they fine millionaires and billionaires.

Simply put, no one likes the sports czars, but fans like the results they provide.

And perhaps that’s where DeSantis has an opportunity to claim his MVP trophy.

Take, for example, the COVID years. DeSantis’ rough-and-tumble approach at the time earned him the nickname “DeathSantis.” But now, years removed from that awful blip in history, it’s become clear that reopening schools ahead of much of the rest of the nation was, indeed, the right move. Critics will argue he gambled with lives and that gamble could have gone wrong. But at the end of the day, the sky did not fall any further than it was already falling.

Additionally, DeSantis, as a former college athlete and current cleat-chaser, would probably like being the College Sports Czar a lot more than he seems to like being Governor, a position for which his annoyance is often on display. The Governor enjoys golf as a favorite pastime, and he seems to truly enjoy taking his family to sporting events.

Who can forget DeSantis’ endearing 2023 story about taking two of his kids to a Jacksonville Jaguars game against the Kansas City Chiefs in which the kids, accustomed to watching FSU college football games, saw Chiefs fans doing a similar Tomahawk chop.

“They were the only two fans in Jaguar jerseys doing the Tomahawk chop with all the Kansas City fans, the Chiefs fans like it,” DeSantis said at the time.

Less endearing, managing a college sports comeback tour would also give DeSantis an opportunity to engage in another of his favorite pastimes: culture wars.

Want to allow transgender athletes to compete on teams that align with their gender identity?

Not on Czar DeSantis’ watch.