Florida State anticipates exiting the Atlantic Coast Conference: Today is the Board of Trustees meeting for Florida State. Someone with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press that the future of the sports department and its membership in the Atlantic Coast Conference will be talked about.
The board is likely to talk about a possible way out, which could include going to court against the ACC and signing contracts that bind the conference’s members for another 12 years, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Thursday because the school hadn’t released the meeting agenda yet.
Florida State anticipates exiting the Atlantic Coast Conference:
Florida State’s leaders are unhappy with the way things are going in the ACC. Schools get less money from the conference than from the Southeastern and Big Ten leagues. The ACC has a ten-year media rights deal with ESPN, which will soon make it different from the other conferences.
“We are not happy with how things are right now,” Florida State President Rick McCullough said at a board meeting in August.
Neither Power Five conference winner has ever made the College Football Playoff with a perfect record. This month, Florida State won the ACC football championship game.
The fact that Alabama, the SEC winner, beat the Seminoles 13-0 to a spot in the playoffs made people at Florida State angry again at a conference that many of their fans think holds back their sports program, especially the football team.
Before joining another league, an ACC school would need to fight the grant of rights to leave the league. These rights are given to the ACC and last until 2036. Media rights allow the ACC to show all sports games for its member schools.
There is also an exit fee of three times the ACC’s running budget, about $120 million, if a school wants to leave.
Other conferences haven’t snatched the ACC in the most recent round of realignment. This is because of the length of their deal and the possibility of financial fines.
But it has also caused worry in the conference, whose members see a future in which SEC and Big Ten schools get more than $75 million a year from their leagues and ACC schools struggle to stay within $30 million of their rivals.
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In August, FSU board head Peter Collins said, “It would be hard to run any other kind of business like this.”
A growing budget gap isn’t the only concern of ACC schools, but Florida State has been the loudest.
By implementing a new income sharing plan, the ACC hopes to assuage some of these concerns.
The ACC also chose to grow, and next year Stanford, California, and SMU will join. All three schools decided to join the league at a lower cost. The extra money ESPN will pay to bring in new members will go into a bonus pool.
These three schools voted against growth along with Clemson, North Carolina, and Florida State, but it wasn’t enough to stop the initiative because 12 other schools, including Notre Dame, supported it.