When Florida State plays in the ACC, here’s what you ought to know concerning the game.

When Florida State plays in the ACC, here’s what you ought to know concerning the game.

Florida State is still thinking about its options for leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference.
It has called an emergency meeting of its Board of Trustees to Friday morning, which has reignited talk of realignment in college sports after the fall football season took a back seat to a crazy summer of conference reshuffling.

After the last game of the regular season last Saturday, conference title week has begun. The ACC Championship is one of the most-watched games of the year.

One team is trying to make it into the College Football Playoff, while the other team is trying to ruin the game.

If the Florida State Seminoles beat the Louisville Cardinals 10–2, they would be 13-0 and in the running for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

A loss to Kentucky to Week 13 pretty much rules out Louisville as a dark horse playoff candidate. Even if they win the conference title, that won’t be enough.

The meeting was announced on Thursday, almost three weeks after the Seminoles turned the first undefeated Power 5 champion to be left out of the College Football Playoff.

This decision angered university officials, the board, and the athletic department, who had been critical of the ACC for a year for a number of reasons, such as its growing revenue gap with other conferences, the way it distributes revenue, and its place in the college football landscape.

If an ACC school wants out of the league, they would have to fight the gift of rights. Also, a school that wants to depart from the ACC is required to pay an exit fee equal to a third of the league’s running budget, which is about $120 million.

All ACC members, including Florida State, signed a grant of rights with the league that lasts until 2036, which is the length of its TV deal with ESPN.

This gives the league access to its media rights, such as TV revenue and home game broadcasts for all sports.

No one has ever used the law to question the grant of rights. ACC officials have said that the grant of rights is “ironclad” in the past and are sure that the paper is strong.

But Florida State’s lawyer looked it over at the league office at Charlotte, North Carolina. If Florida State chooses to fight the grant of rights, it won’t leave the league right away because the process takes time.

There is also a big chance of challenging the rights award. Someone from the ACC told ESPN in 2022, “There will be a hell of an on-campus fight, I can tell you that.”

Since NCAA realignment began again within the summer of 2021, while the SEC joined Texas and Oklahoma, almost every ACC school has looked into the gift of rights. The next summer, USC and UCLA joined the Big Ten.

Changes like those shocked college football, but they also made the ACC and schools in the league more aware of the fact that they were losing money and importance.

In February, Florida State’s sports the head Michael Alford told the school’s board of trustees that the school would be losing $30 million a year to SEC and Big Ten schools when their new TV contracts started. This was the first sign that the Seminoles were unhappy with the ACC.

The ACC eventually changed how it distributed revenue, in large part because Florida State pushed for it.

However, an August meeting of the FSU board of trustees in Tallahassee made it clearer how unhappy the school had become as another round of realignments changed its conference affiliations.

Richard McCullough, the head of the university, made it clear that the school would “very seriously” think about leaving the league.

Peter Collins, the head of the board, made it clear that the grant of privileges “isn’t going to be the document which keeps we from taking action.”

This came as board member after board member pushed the institution to make a plan to its long-term survival.

It wasn’t until August that McCullough told ESPN that he wasn’t “that optimistic that we would be able to stay.” We’ll have to complete something at some point.

The ACC added Stanford, California, or SMU a few weeks after the board meeting. This was in response to the Big Ten getting Oregon and Washington along with the Big 12 also growing.

Florida State, Clemson, as well as North Carolina all said no to adding more schools. Many people saw the change as a way to protect the league’s for a long time future in case schools left for other leagues.