Three decades removed from his playing days in Coral Gables, Warren Sapp still doesn’t have much patience for anyone wearing Florida State colors, even if they are just trying to get out of the rain.
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A video surfaced on X on Tuesday night, shared by user Lashy Bills, showing the 53-year-old Pro Football Hall of Famer getting into a tense, physical spat with a Florida State fan at a rain-soaked tailgate.
What started as a cramped moment under a canopy quickly turned ugly when the man, standing alongside his daughter, reached out and brushed against Sapp’s umbrella while trying to find cover from the downpour.
Sapp immediately bristled at the contact. “Don’t touch my umbrella, bro,” Sapp said in the video before firing a kick at the person right in front of the latter’s daughter.
The clip captures a strange, split-second tug-of-war between Sapp’s temper and his awareness of who was watching. A few moments after going after the father, Sapp pivoted and reached out to shake the daughter’s hand, seemingly trying to keep the kid out of the crossfire.
The father, visibly stung by the reaction from a player he had admired for years, tried to appeal to Sapp’s better nature. He reminded the former Tampa Bay Buccaneers star that he had long been a supporter of his career, before gesturing toward his kid and telling Sapp, “It’s my daughter, you’ve got to be true.”
The plea didn’t cool things down. The back-and-forth continued to simmer until the father and daughter finally turned and walked away through the wet lot, shouting back at Sapp as they left.
For a couple of seasons in Boulder, it looked as though Sapp might have mellowed out. When Deion Sanders brought him onto the Colorado staff in 2024, where he eventually worked as the Buffaloes’ pass rush coordinator, Sapp leaned hard into the role of the patient veteran teacher.
Now no longer in that role at Colorado, Wednesday’s footage looked a lot more like the combative, short-fused Sapp who spent his post-playing career racking up headlines for off-field dust-ups.
Sapp played for Miami from 1992 to 1994, when games against Florida State carried plenty of bad blood and national title implications. Players from those Hurricanes teams didn’t need television cameras to get worked up about the Seminoles.
They genuinely disliked them, and judging by Sapp’s reaction, those feelings haven’t changed much in 30 years. With the unbeaten Hurricanes currently sitting atop the AP Poll at No. 1, the bragging rights around South Florida have only made the needle between the two fanbases sharper.
However, the Seminoles came quite close to causing a huge upset against Miami in Week 7. Despite being heavy favorites, Mario Cristobal’s team needed double overtime to beat Florida State in a nail-biter.
Even by the unfiltered standards of old-school Miami-FSU hostility, though, booting a fan in a wet parking lot over a few inches of umbrella space, while his kid stands an arm’s length away, is a tough scene to defend. Despite the video now showing Warren Sapp kicking the man, the Hall of Famer hasn’t released a statement regarding the incident.