College football fans in the southeastern United States are known as a different breed. In this portion of the country, the NFL is less important than teams from the SEC and ACC. It doesn’t even matter if the fans are extremely young. They can still wax poetic about Jimbo Fisher, Urban Meyer, Steve Spurrier or other big names from coaching history. In fact, one youngster is so fired up about the Florida State Seminoles that he is trying to raise money for a very specific purpose.
According to Sports Illustrated, a 4-year-old football fan named Grayton Grant is on a mission to get head coach Willie Taggart fired. The former Oregon Ducks coach has only achieved a 6-9 record in 15 games, and Grayton is tired of the misery. In order to achieve this goal, he set up a lemonade stand on Saturday to raise enough money for the buyout on Taggart’s contract. His father, Daniel, a Florida State alum and booster, helped with this bold strategy.
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Together, the pair were able to raise $241 on Saturday. Daniel promised that he would match any money generated by the lemonade stand, and they sent a check for $482 to Seminole Boosters, Inc. with the memo: “Taggart Buy-Out!”
“I hope what I did helped because it was really hot,” Grayton said to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Taggart is currently in the second season of his six-year, $30 million contract with the school. If fired, he would be owed 80 percent of his remaining salary. This means that Grayton would have to raise $17 million in order to achieve his goal. That’s not an insurmountable amount of money for the 4-year-old, but he may have to raise the price on the lemonade in order to reach this figure quickly.
“I am tired of losing football games and being made fun of at school for being a Seminole fan. At 4, I am already starting to gravitate towards the color orange. You don’t want that for an innocent kid like me…” Grayton wrote in the note that accompanied the check.
Following Saturday’s home loss to Virginia, the Seminoles dropped to 1-2 on the season. They will now host the Louisville Cardinals on Saturday with the hopes of achieving victory. Daniel, Grayton, and the family will be in attendance for this battle, but they did not reveal whether or not lemonade will be available for purchase. If the Seminoles lose, it will be time to kick the beverage sales into high gear.
