Leon County Judge Officially Orders ACC To Privately Share Pivotal Documents With FSU

The "ESPN Agreement" has been one of the most controversial documents in sports over the last eight months. However, almost no one has seen it.

Florida State President Richard McCullough attends the celebration of life for legendary FSU baseball coach Mike Martin at Dick Howser Stadium on Saturday, Feb. 10, 2024. / Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat / USA

Leon County Judge John C. Cooper has officially ordered the Atlantic Coast Conference to disclose six documents – including the “ESPN Agreement” – exclusively to Florida State University’s legal team. FSU and the ACC came together to request that both parties be able to view these documents. The league will have seven days to issue these documents. The documents will be unredacted but FSU cannot disclose its content to the public and must be returned or destroyed in 60 days.

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The proposal of the arrangement stated, “The purpose of this Order is for the ESPN Agreements to be treated as confidential in their entirety until this Court has had an opportunity to consider the parties' respective positions about which provisions of the ESPN Agreement are due protection and to determine the scope and extent of those protections.”

A signature from Judge Cooper should only be good news for Florida State. One of the main goals of the ACC was to keep the documents under wraps – presumably to bar FSU from finding any loopholes, preserving the “ironclad” status of the Grant of Rights Agreement. However, with this order from the Leon County judge, FSU is getting a leg up.

Simultaneously, it would maintain the “trade secrets” that ESPN, the ACC, the Big 10, the Big 12, and the SEC have fought to keep private despite legal action from AG Moody in her quest to make the documents public due to the Sunshine Laws in the State of Florida.

AG Moody claims that since Florida State is a public university, any contracts or agreement documents should be public record. This goes against the ruling of Mecklenburg County Judge Louis A. Bledsoe III, who claims FSU waived its “sovereign immunity” in its dealings with the ACC.

Why the ACC has decided to propose this alongside Florida State is interesting, though. It is not clear how the conference will benefit from this move.

This is a developing story.

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