FSU President Sends Major Message To ACC During Board of Trustees Meeting

"I believe FSU, at some point, will have to very seriously consider leaving the ACC unless there was a radical change to the revenue distribution."

Florida State is at risk of falling behind the country with the growing revenue gap between the Big Ten/SEC compared to the ACC. University leadership is aware of the problem and recently addressed the issue during a Board of Trustees meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

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FSU President Richard McCullough sent a major message to the ACC about the program's future with the conference. It's clear that the Seminoles are willing to do whatever they have to do to stay among the premier programs in the country.

"We currently as you all know face a very difficult situation. We are seeing large media deals that have been made with places like the Big Ten and the SEC which in many ways are creating an existential crisis for Florida State University as we will be $30 million per school per year behind in our gap in conference distribution with contracts that are set to go through 2036," McCullough said. "Without increasing revenue, we will raise major challenges to compete in football, NIL, coaching salaries, and attractive facilities to continue building our brand and be competitive. Our Title IX could be completely affected in a very dramatic way."

"We of course are not satisfied with our current situation. We love the ACC, we love our partners at ESPN. Our goal would be to stay in the ACC but staying in the ACC with the current situation is hard for us to figure out how we remain competitive unless there were a major change in the revenue distribution within the ACC conference itself. That has not happened, those discussions are ongoing and continue to explore that situation," McCullough continued. "FSU helps to drive value, will drive value for any partner but we have spent a year trying to understand how we might fix the issue. There are no issue fixes to this problem, to this challenge, but a group of us has spent literally a year on this. We've explored every possible option that you could possibly imagine and we continue to explore all of those options."

"The issue at hand is what can we do to allow ourselves to be competitive in football and get what I think, selfishly, is the revenue we deserve in our media situation," McCullough added. "I think this continues to be a very difficult issue, there's a lot going in the world of conference realignment with the PAC deal imminent and lots of things are going on. I would have to say that my current assessment of the situation after very deep analysis is that I believe FSU, at some point, will have to very seriously consider leaving the ACC unless there was a radical change to the revenue distribution."

This is the most public message we've seen from Florida State in regard to the program exploring options outside of the ACC. It remains to be seen if the conference makes some sort of response to the issues that the Seminoles have outlined.

To this point, the ACC hasn't made many changes to its revenue distribution. That's not going to work for FSU with the possibility of programs in the Big Ten and SEC making upwards of $30 million more per year over the next 13 years which could create a $400+ million gap by the expiration of the Grant of Rights in 2036.

Multiple other Board of Trustees members and Athletic Director Michael Alford spoke on the subject as well. At the very least, it's evident that Florida State is pushing the ACC for a change while threatening the possibility of making a move to a new conference in the process.

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