The Florida State Board of Trustees has, apparently out of the blue, scheduled a board meeting for next week, which may or may not signal that the school is preparing to leave the ACC, depending on who you believe.
This is the speculation in and around Tallahassee, with the local paper, the Tallahassee Democrat, headlining its story on the news of the scheduled meeting, “Florida State Trustees set meeting for Wednesday. FSU conference realignment in works?”
It’s noteworthy here that as of Thursday, FSU Athletics Director Michael Alford was telling ESPN, for a story on possible conference realignment activity in the wake of Colorado’s decision to bolt the Pac-12 for the Big 12, that there was not a meeting of the Board of Trustees on the upcoming schedule, which was significant because of the Aug. 15 deadline for a school to notify the ACC in writing that it is planning to leave in the next year.
From there being no scheduled Board of Trustees meeting ahead of that Aug. 15 deadline on Thursday, to there being a scheduled meeting being made public on Friday, that would seem like some smoke that could perhaps signify fire on the realignment front.
It needs to be noted that the published agenda for the Board of Trustees meeting looks pretty routine, and that the Democrat reported that the FSU president’s office is saying that the agenda focuses on budget approvals and has been in the works for weeks.
It, then, would also need to be said that you wouldn’t necessarily expect the Board of Trustees to give those who might want to try to oppose an effort to get the school from leaving the ACC several days notice to achieve their aims.
How a departure would happen would be the story here.
ACC schools, in 2016, each agreed to a grant of media rights to the conference through 2036 that would have them forfeit in the range of $40 million per year in TV monies as part of the penalty for leaving ahead of the end of the current media-rights deal.
This would come on top of an exit fee that would come with an approximately $120 million penalty, meaning, all told, a single school departing on its own would be on the hook for somewhere in the range of $600 million.
A possible out would be if it wasn’t just one school leaving on its own.
FSU was among a group of ACC schools that came to be known as The Magnificent Seven – FSU, Miami, Clemson, UNC, North Carolina State, UVA and Virginia Tech – that talked in the spring about their options for addressing the conference’s declining financial standing relative to the SEC and Big Ten.
A backdrop to those discussions is that it has been speculated that if a majority of the conference’s members were to vote to leave the conference en masse, the grants of media rights from the individual schools would become null and void, and schools would be able to make new conference affiliations without the significant financial penalties.
The spark of rebellion from The Magnificent Seven was seemingly quelled with a tentative agreement at the conference’s spring meetings to divide the current pool of TV money up based on success on the playing field, but of course that kind of move would do nothing to address the bigger problem.
The lingering issue from the spring loomed over this week’s ACC Football Kickoff media event in Charlotte, with Commissioner Jim Phillips trying hard to sell the “all is well” message, while conceding that the conference is third in the Power 5 pecking order, which may or may not even be the case anymore with the news subsequent to his declaration on that regarding Colorado and the Big 12, which is still actively looking to expand beyond that move.
This newly scheduled FSU Board of Trustees meeting could be the first in a line of similar meetings across the ACC geographic footprint that will lead to the dissolution of the conference.
Or it could be the routine meeting focusing on budget approvals that has been in the works for weeks that the president’s office down there is saying.
The next few days should be fun just with all the speculation between now and Wednesday.
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Chris Graham
