Florida State, without a landing spot, or an idea of how it would go it alone to challenge the ACC’s supposedly legally ironclad grant of media rights, appears ready to move forward anyway, quixotically.
“I’m not that optimistic that we’ll be able to stay,” FSU President Richard McCullough told ESPN before a Board of Trustees meeting on Wednesday, where the sparks really began to fly.
At issue is the growing disparity between what the ACC pays its member schools from its TV deal with ESPN and what the SEC and Big Ten are able to pay their schools.
The gap is currently in the area of $25 million per year per school, and is projected to grow to the $50 million-per-year level by the end of the decade.
FSU and other ACC members are bound to the ACC by grant-of-rights agreements signed in 2016 that runs all the way out to 2036.
The annual value of the media rights to home games is estimated at roughly $40 million per school, a not-insignificant amount that would be put at risk by a school that would try to get out of the grant-of-rights agreement.
On top of that, a school seeking to leave would owe the conference a $120 million exit fee.
All told, a unilateral exit, like the kind that Florida State seems to be considering, would cost somewhere between $500 and $600 million.
This is why we’ve not seen anyone, until today, talk seriously and publicly about leaving, and why we’ve not heard of any real efforts by rival conferences to reach out to gauge interest in any ACC schools that may be on the fence.
Florida State is among seven ACC schools – along with Virginia, Virginia Tech, North Carolina, NC State, Clemson and Miami – that have discussed among themselves what they could do to address the grant-of-rights and money-gap issues.
The group, which came to be known as The Magnificent Seven, was able to get the other members to agree at the league’s spring meetings to a new revenue-distribution model that gives more money from the ACC’s overall pie to schools that have more success on the playing field.
But in the end, all that does is divide up a smaller pie, and based on what we heard from McCullough and other FSU leaders, that’s not going to be enough.
“FSU helps to drive value and will drive value for any partner, but we have spent a year trying to understand how we might fix the issue. There are no easy fixes to this challenge, but a group of us have spent literally a year. We’ve explored every possible option that you can imagine. The issue at hand is, what can we do to allow ourselves to be competitive in football and get what I think is the revenue we deserve?” McCullough said.
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Chris Graham
