Florida State board approves legal action against ACC

Florida State will officially be the first institution to challenge a grant of rights deal in court following a Board of Trustees meeting on Friday morning.

And there it is.

After months of saber-rattling and veiled threats, Florida State University has officially started the process of exiting the ACC. On Friday morning, the Florida State Board of Trustees unanimously voted to take legal action against the conference, challenging its grant of rights and the exit fee, which is three times the league's operating budget, or roughly $130 million.

Damon Herota - Florida State Athletics / Seminoles.com

The move is the first the university needed to take to exit the conference. The decision was preceded by a perilous couple of years for the ACC, beginning with the SEC's additions of Texas and Oklahoma, and followed up by the Big Ten's additions of USC and UCLA. Those acquisitions changed the landscape of college athletics, monopolizing much of the wealth in two obscenely powerful forces.

Feeling left behind by its peers, Florida State, along with Clemson, fought for - and won - a greater share of the ACC's annual profits. Just looking at the numbers, ACC institutions are looking at receiving roughly half of the financial compensation Big Ten and SEC schools will earn in the future.

As long as Florida State notifies ACC it is leaving league before this August - it has not done this yet - the earliest Seminoles could leave ACC would be June 30, 2025 & join a new league on July 1, 2025

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) December 22, 2023

It seemed for a while as if that would be enough to keep Florida State in place, but the precarious relationship between the school and the conference came to a head when the Seminole football team was left out of the College Football Playoff earlier this month, despite an undefeated 13-0 record and ACC Championship.

The exclusion seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of their relationship with the ACC. We'll have to wait now to see how the legal proceedings progress, but it seems an exit is inevitable. The earliest FSU could leave the conference is 2025, and the schools is estimating that could cost them nearly half a billion dollars (exit fee + lost revenue).