Important stuff first, happy Thanksgiving.

Jeff Bowden is the offensive coach at Florida State where his dad, Bobby Bowden, is the head coach. Jeff resigned his position last week, effective Sunday.

Florida State is having a bad year on the turf and plenty of their fans were calling for both the son’s and senior’s heads.

The nature of the agreement by which Jeff “resigned” and was reassigned is deeply troubling.

He will be paid his full salary of $141,500 per year through August 2007. He will do so as a reassigned employee of the university outside the athletic department. By agreement, on Aug. 7, 2007 he “voluntarily resigns his position as an employee of FSU …”

But wait, there’s more. He will be retained after that date through 2012 by the Seminole Boosters Inc. “as an independent contractor to the University for special projects … and shall be paid a total of $537,500 with non-donor revenue from the Boosters.”

There’s more. Bowden can get another job and still get these payments.

Something really stinks here.

The agreement to end Bowden’s contract was signed by the university president, the athletic director, Bowden AND the president of the boosters. The boosters provided the money to buy Bowden out.

The boosters are a non-profit corporation in Florida. As stated on their Web site, they are the “athletics fund raising arm of the University,” with one purpose being to enrich “the overall educational environment…” of FSU.

The New York Times’ Selena Roberts reported that these Boosters raised, “$42 million in direct public support, according to its 2004 tax documents” and the boosters president was paid $228,184.

The expectations for 2006 are annual funds raised of $12 million and $12 million-$15 million in capital donations. All of this from moneyed football fanatics who get tax write-offs up to 80 percent for their “gifts.”

Trying not to tick off money givers with this deal, the agreement uses that “non-donor revenue” language. A boosters VP, Charles Barnes, was quoted last week as saying the buyout money would “primarily” come from the sale of Coca-Cola at the stadium.

That is money, of course, that would otherwise have gone elsewhere. It is not money falling from heaven for this specific purpose.

Where is FSU in all this? According to Jerry Kutz, VP of the Boosters staff, “What the university asked us to do was fund the compensation. The agreement was that it would be non-donor money.”

So the university asked the boosters for the money to buy out an employee’s deal since he apparently wasn’t going to go away with just the cash due under the rest of the contract.

When FSU AD Dave Hart was asked about the $537,000, he said, “I don’t even speak to that.”

It would be nice to say this is another, albeit extreme, case of boosters gone wild. But, no, this is about university gone insane.

No boosters club should have been involved in this matter, monetarily or otherwise. A week after the NCAA released a report calling for university presidents to regain control over their athletic programs, another football factory succumbs to the sludge of big-time college sports.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.