BREAKING NEWS: Florida State’s modified lawsuit demonstrates the university’s willingness to defy the ACC in its struggle to survive today….

BREAKING NEWS: Florida State’s modified lawsuit demonstrates the university’s willingness to defy the ACC in its struggle to survive today.

It’s inevitable that Florida State and the ACC will part ways, but based on everything we’ve seen thus far, it won’t be amicable.

The stakes were crystal evident when Florida State filed its initial application in December. The university believes that its athletics department’s capacity to compete at the highest level and Seminole football’s existence depend on it exiting the ACC by all means necessary. Due to the ACC’s poor handling of its broadcast rights, the Seminoles lose out on millions of dollars every year. These funds are necessary for FSU to remain competitive in the collegiate sports industry’s never-ending arms race.

Florida State let out resentment over a decade in the past this week in an expanded complaint over the conference’s mishandled commercial issues. The most recent document describes the initial media agreement the ACC had with ESPN and Raycom in 2011, which set the conference up for its current predicament.

As previously reported by Tomahawk Nation, it accused then-ACC Commissioner John Swofford of engaging in “self-dealing” when he continued to support Raycom (and consequently, Swofford’s son Chad Swofford, a Raycom Sports executive since 2007) and caused $82 million in missed television rights revenue:

How about the ACC? The league and ESPN inked an incredibly retro contract in 2011, which is still to blame for the conference’s problems. The ACC traded over all of its third-tier rights to ESPN as part of the arrangement for practically nothing, even though it was able to secure equal compensation to the SEC and Big Ten for its primary TV rights. Then, for $50 million a year that it did not have to share with the conference, ESPN sublicensed those to Raycom Sports. John Swofford, the ACC Commissioner at the time, ordered this to be done in order to maintain Raycom as an ACC TV partner in TV talks above all others. Swofford stated that Raycom’s long-standing friendship was the reason. maintaining the rights to the ACC was a necessary lifeline after Raycom had lost the rights to the SEC the year prior. Whether it was an egregious example of nepotism or terrible lack of foresight to see where college media rights were going the deal has been an albatross around the neck of the league ever since. Maryland specifically cited the ACC’s lack of future TV revenue in its decision to bolt for the Big Ten a year later.

Attempts to renegotiate the deal with ESPN have come with giving up increasingly more for increasingly less. The original ACC Grant of Rights was created in2013 after the Notre Dame deal as a way to get ESPN to increase media payouts & in 2016 the GOR was extended to 2036 to get ESPN on board with creating the ACC Network. Another central focus is the mismanagement in the lead-up to the creation of the ACC Network. It effectively accuses Swofford of lying to ACC membership about an ultimatum that ESPN supposedly presented to the conference in 2016. Swofford and ACC officials told the schools that in order for ESPN to create the ACC Network, the schools would need to extend the Grant of Rights through 2036. However, there is no documentation of any such demand from ESPN, nor did the ACC receive any additional financial gain from ESPN for the Grant

The complaint also claimed that ACC institutions had to spend anywhere from $110 million to $120 million in order to get ready for the introduction of the ACC Network. Under former athletic director Stan Wilcox, one of the main causes of FSU’s spiraling annual sports debt was attributed by Tomahawk Nation to the network’s launch expenses.

Stan Wilcox, a former Duke deputy athletic director, took Randy Spetman’s post. In the article regarding Wilcox’s hiring published in Tomahawk Nation, the question

In 2023, Florida State was playing for a national championship, and all but one of its games attracted over a million television viewers. The only game that was not rated by Nielsen was the Southern Miss game, which aired on the ACC Network. More than six games garnered more than one million television viewers for any other ACC program.