@Mamareeb Agree with what you are guessing about the Gator Nation/Sunshine scholarships and Benacquisto. My son is OOS and was given the Gator Nation scholarship and he also gets Benacquisto. He accepted both, since like you said, it’s good to have a back up in case something goes wrong wtih Benacquisto (and for insurance against the unlikely event that they don’t continue it for OOS students while he’s still attending).
Also, he received a National Merit corporate scholarship, and the number they give in the report is for students who received a UF college National Merit award. There is at least one (mine) and probably more who received a corporate NM award which made them eligible for Benacquisto but they did not receive the UF college NM award because students can only accept one type of NM award. So that was my long winded way of saying that this report doesn’t actually show how many NM finalists are attending UF. It shows how many accepted the UF college sponsored award. (unless I’m reading it wrong)
And just for extra data–the only reason he looked at UF is because of the Benacquisto scholarship. It is not really a school on the radar where we live (New England) but he fell in love with it when we visited and though he was accepted to all the schools he applied to (including one Ivy and another highly ranked private school), he chose UF for the money, weather, and quality of education. I would love to spread the word up here about what a great school it is, and I’m also interested in seeing if the number of OOS applications increases with the Common App.