Florida State’s lawsuit all about desperation to avoid being left behind

The freedom fighters of Florida State aren’t doing this — and by this, we mean potentially blowing up college sports beyond all recognition — because of sour relationships in the Atlantic Coast Conference or because they’re mad about being denied a College Football Playoff spot.

We know it’s not about that because the school’s lawyers, its trustees and even its president Richard McCullough said so over and over Friday as they announced that they’re suing the ACC in an attempt to break the contract that binds them to the league through 2036. 

This is just about pursuing freedom, baby — the freedom to spend endless amounts on football just like those teams in the Big Ten and SEC. After all, don’t the quarter-zip wearing patriots at Florida State deserve the same right as anyone else in college sports to shop themselves to the highest bidder? Is it even America if you can’t preemptively go to court before trying to weasel out of a signed agreement that’s no longer favorable to your interests? 

“The system is broken,” said trustee and former Florida State quarterback Drew Weatherford. “I view this as doing our part to look out for ourselves but also to take a step in the right direction to try to fix the system.” 

How benevolent of them. Surely, Florida State wrecking the ACC and potentially re-starting another round of realignment is going to be the moment where everything starts to make sense and be more equitable in college sports. 

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Or, more likely, it’ll be the moment where the band-aid gets ripped off for good. The moment where the elite level of college football truly starts to become NFL-lite and the battle for table scraps begins among the unwashed peasants that FSU wants to leave behind. 

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In describing FSU’s dire financial situation in the ACC, Weatherford unironically chastised college sports as a place where “50-to-70 schools (are) waking up every year pretending to be competing for something they really have no chance to compete for.”

That’s always been true, of course, in college football. It becomes more codified into the system with every round of realignment and each new lucrative television deal that launches the SEC and Big Ten another notch or two ahead of the other conferences.

That won’t change, and Florida State knows it. But they don’t care about inequity in college sports. They care how it potentially applies to them, and the school is now prepared to take the ultimate legal step to ensure they don’t get caught on the wrong side of the line. 

For that, it’s hard to blame anyone at Florida State. When your distribution from the ACC is $40 million and the schools you’re competing against for recruits and championships are headed toward the $70 million range, it’s hard to accept. 

Under former commissioner John Swofford, the ACC made two key moves in the last decade that have now put the conference and Florida State at odds. The first was to make it extremely penal for a team to leave the conference through an agreement called the Grant of Rights, a clear reaction to Maryland’s shocking departure for the Big Ten in 2012. The second was to sign a television deal that locked the ACC in with ESPN for the long-term in exchange for launching the ACC Network, which the conference thought was necessary to keep up with the SEC and Big Ten. 

In both instances, the ACC accepted terms that it knew might look unfavorable down the road in exchange for long-term stability among its membership. The ACC might have to live with a financial gap, but leaving the league would be so financially onerous that nobody would even consider it. 

Or so they thought. 

According to Florida State, the penalty for leaving the ACC would be $572 million — a number that will be challenged in court. The ACC, via a statement from commissioner Jim Phillips, says the Seminoles “willingly and knowingly re-signed the current Grant of Rights in 2016, which is wholly enforceable and binding through 2036.” The school’s lawyers say they were strong-armed into a bad deal that isn’t even legally enforceable under Florida law. 

No matter which side you’re on, only the court’s opinion matters in determining who’s right. And it’s not even totally clear how FSU will get on even financial footing with the SEC and Big Ten even if they win their freedom from the ACC. As of now, neither league has shown great interest in adding Florida State, and it’s not a certainty that either one would act unless they could make more money for their current members by adding the Seminoles. 

But the theory Florida State is acting on here is logical: College sports has shown a propensity over and over for the most valuable brands to congregate into a smaller number of leagues. Even if it takes one or two more cycles of realignment, Florida State will eventually have to be among that group.

That’s the end game, though. It’s inevitable, and everyone in college sports knows it.

Once the Pac-12 blew up and the Big Ten became a league that stretches from Piscataway, New Jersey, to Los Angeles and Seattle, there were no more rules or norms.

Conferences are no longer groups of like-minded schools with shared history and geography, they are media companies that exist to aggregate and sell the broadcast rights of their members. The next step in that evolution is an obvious one: The most valuable members keep congregating and shedding the dead weight until you end up with two leagues that look like college football’s answer to the AFC and NFC. 

If Florida State is successful in wrecking the ACC’s media rights deal, the floodgates suddenly open to a world where Clemson, North Carolina and Virginia — the other three most valuable properties in the ACC — also become available. Are the Big Ten and SEC just going to sit idly by and let the other one gain the upper hand? Of course not. In realignment, you either get criticized for acting or you lose your job for not acting. Guess which one people prefer. 

That’s the bet Florida State is making, and it’s not a bad one. It’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be messy, and it just might cause the ACC to implode. Is Florida State doing something desperate? Yes, but only because it sees a desperate future if it can’t forge a path to the Big Ten or SEC. 

Though the gravity of dollars inevitably made their business look more like pro sports than amateurism, colleges have tried to maintain at least some tie to an ethic that goes beyond the next check they can cash. Florida State no longer has time for such high-mindedness. If the Seminoles win their freedom from the ACC, the changes that have already occurred in college sports will look like child’s play compared to what comes next.