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This week, Florida State and the ACC sued and counter-sued each other to determine whether the Seminoles could leave the conference without paying an almost $600 million exit fee.
For more than a year, Florida State has considered suing the ACC to get out of its decade-plus-long media rights contract. But the College Football Playoff’s decision to omit FSU from this year’s playoff—giving the spot instead to the SEC’s Alabama—finally pushed the school to file a lawsuit on Friday, the school said.
The lawsuit, filed in a local Florida court, argues that the ACC’s “draconian” Grant of Rights contract—which states that FSU would owe $572 million to breach the contract and leave the conference before 2036—is unenforceable under Florida state law.
“I fully support the Board’s decision to take this legal action against the ACC,” FSU president Richard McCullough said. “It is becoming painfully apparent that Florida State’s athletic ambitions and institutional priorities are no longer served by the ACC’s leadership.”
The ACC, for its part, is standing by its contracts. The conference said in a statement that the contracts have “benefited” all member schools.
In anticipation of FSU’s lawsuit, the conference filed its own lawsuit in a local North Carolina court on Thursday. The 100-plus-page complaint alleges that FSU’s signing of the Grant of Rights is enforceable in other states where there are ACC schools, like North Carolina. WCTV Sports first reported the news
The FSU complaint—to be filed a day before the infamous “Seinfeld” holiday of Festivus—is a nearly 40-page-long airing of grievances over what FSU sees as the ACC’s incompetence.
The complaint detailed more than a decade of negotiations and re-negotiations between the ACC and primary media rights partner ESPN, which put the conference at a significant financial disadvantage compared to others in the Power 4, court documents alleged. ACC schools can expect an average of $35 million per year, while SEC schools can expect close to $60 million each, and Big Ten schools can expect somewhere in the mid-$60 million range. It says the ACC “duped” schools into signing the strict Grant of Rights.
The complaint also alleged that the ACC “mishandled” the most recent round of conference realignment, and “diluted” the conference’s media rights value and strength of schedule by adding SMU, Stanford, and Cal earlier this year. FSU appeared particularly miffed that the ACC did not seriously consider Oregon State instead of those three schools, despite being ranked much higher in polls.
(The complaint estimates 80% of conference media rights appeal comes from football, and these three schools did not increase it.)
“In sum, the ACC has negotiated itself into a self-described “existential crisis,” rendered itself fiscally unstable and substantially undermined its members’ capacity to compete at the elite level,” FSU said in the complaint. “The ACC…appeared dedicated to self preservation and self-perpetuation over the fiscal well-being of its members. A conference so dedicated cannot endure.”
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