Florida State clearly wants out of the ACC. Bubba Cunningham, the AD at North Carolina, wants FSU leaders to pipe down about it.
“I don’t think it’s good for our league for them to be out there barking like that,” Cunningham said on “The Adam Gold Show” on 99.9 The Fan on Thursday.
This is significant because UNC is among the group that came to be known as The Magnificent Seven, the seven schools – FSU, UNC, NC State, UVA, Virginia Tech, Clemson and Miami – that has been talking with each other for the past several months about what they can do to address the growing athletics revenue gap for ACC members relative to their peers in the SEC and Big Ten.
Those discussions, reportedly, included the schools trading notes on what they can do to try to get out from the onerous grants of media rights that ACC members signed over to the conference with the 20-year media deal that the ACC made with ESPN in 2016.
FSU president Richard McCullough told ESPN ahead of a Board of Trustees meeting on Wednesday that he’s “not that optimistic that we’ll be able to stay” in the ACC given the current fiscal climate, and board member Drew Weatherford, a former ‘Noles QB, went a big step further.
“Unless something drastic changes on the revenue side in the ACC, it’s not a matter of if we leave, in my opinion, it’s a matter of how and when we leave,” Weatherford said.
If there was a thought that FSU was just getting out in front of the rest of The Magnificent Seven to take the first bullets on leaving, Cunningham’s comments on Thursday would seem, at first glance, anyway, to trend in the direction of disabusing us of that notion.
“I’d rather see them be a good member of the league, support the league, and if they have to make a decision, then so be it. Pay for the exit fee, wait for your grant of rights that you’ve given, and then in 2036, when those rights return to you, do whatever you want,” Cunningham said, doing his best to sound like a scold.
The Carolina AD was also dismissive of comments from FSU leaders to the effect that the grant of media rights “will not be the document that keeps us from taking action,” a direct quote attributed to Peter Collins, the chair of the school’s Board of Trustees, and a sentiment that seems to have been shared by several of the FSU board members at this week’s meeting.
“When you have a general counsel and the university president and the board of trustees say, I’m a member of this conference, and you sign a document that says I’m granting my rights to you, and you have my authority to go negotiate my rights to a network, and the league does that on your behalf, I’m not sure how you can just say, Just kidding. I didn’t like the deal that was struck, and now I want to get out of it. Any contract, it obligates you to what you agreed to on the front end. So I’m scratching my head, wondering what are you talking about,” Cunningham said.
Those bits of PR for the sanctity of the ACC now done, Cunningham later conceded in the radio interview that UNC has had its lawyers looking over the grants of media rights looking for loopholes, and offered a cryptic, but clearly foreboding, comment on what the future holds.
“A lot of schools, a lot of individuals, are going to have to make decisions about what their future looks like,” Cunningham said.
And then, the kicker.
“I don’t see this configuration lasting in perpetuity,” Cunningham said.
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Chris Graham
