Florida State’s union with the ACC, born of necessity, is heading toward a messy end
The vote came late on a Thursday night in mid-September, 1990, after “nine hours of telephone communications and conference calls,” as the front page story in The News & Observer described it. And with that, after more than a month of deliberation, the ACC’s eight presidents and chancellors formally decided to extend an invitation for membership to Florida State.
It was never an easy choice, on either side. Florida State, then a burgeoning national power in football as an independent, also considered a future in the SEC. And in the ACC, then a cozy eight-school league at the epicenter of college basketball near the peak of that sport’s relevance, some questioned whether any expansion was a good idea, let alone one into Florida.
Six of the ACC’s eight schools voted in favor of expansion. Duke and Maryland, which itself decided a little more than 20 years later to leave the conference for the Big Ten, were the holdouts. Not so much because they opposed Florida State, specifically, but because they rejected the argument that the ACC needed to expand at all.
“There was no division about Florida State,” Tom Butters, then the athletics director at Duke, told The N&O in a story published Sept. 14, 1990. “Florida State is acceptable. The question was, and it should be, was expansion in the best interest of the Atlantic Coast Conference?”
Point of no return?
The answer proved to be a resounding yes. But now, more than 32 years into a marriage of convenience and necessity the question appears to be not if it all ends — but when, and how. Florida State’s discontent in the ACC, long simmering beneath a layer of brittle congeniality, has reached a point from which there might be no return.
Where to go from here, after FSU President Richard McCullough, during a recent board of trustees meeting, described the university’s standing in the ACC as an “existential crisis?” Where to go from here after McCullough and FSU trustees — including Drew Weatherford, a former Seminoles quarterback — laid bare their animosity and dissatisfaction with such brazenness?
Portions of that trustees meeting, streamed live last Wednesday afternoon over YouTube, quickly spread online. The messaging was uniform, the strategy clear: Florida State, so its leadership said in plain terms, could not abide the growing revenue disparity between the ACC and the Big Ten and SEC, the nation’s two wealthiest conferences.
The financial trends, Weatherford said, made clear that it was not a matter of if FSU left the ACC, “but a matter of how and when we leave.” Another trustee, Justin Roth, argued the FSU athletics department — and particularly its football program — would die by “a thousand cuts” if forced to remain in the ACC for the duration of a television contract that doesn’t expire until 2036.
“And each cut is a $30 million cut over the next 13 years,” he said.
McCullough, who articulated a desire for FSU to receive “the revenue we deserve in our media situation,” was only slightly less blunt about the university’s relationship with the ACC: “I believe,” he said, “that FSU will have to, at some point, consider very seriously leaving the ACC unless there were a radical change to the revenue distribution.”
Basketball first
When the ACC formally welcomed Florida State in July 1991, it was a natural next step in an enterprise that now seems quaint in comparison. Projections then figured FSU would receive more than $1 million annually in television revenue. The thought went that adding FSU, with all its football might, would bolster a conference that’d built its reputation, and its wealth, on basketball.
And indeed, it worked. For a while, anyway.
The ACC became the nation’s wealthiest conference and arguably its most powerful. Throughout the 1990s, ACC men’s basketball remained the most valuable TV commodity in college sports. The conference was happy to have Florida State raise its football prowess, despite the Seminoles’ complete domination in those days. And FSU, meanwhile, was happy to benefit from the ACC’s basketball money, as well as the league’s overall status atop the hierarchy of college athletics.
Upon the 10-year anniversary of Florida State joining the ACC, the Jacksonville-based Florida Times-Union published a retrospective on how it all came to be. An FSU associate athletics director at the time, Greg Phillips, recalled the internal deliberations, the debate among FSU officials about joining the ACC or the SEC.
“The ACC’s basketball advantage was going to outweigh the SEC’s football advantage,” Phillips told the paper. “Looking back, I think we’ve gotten more dollars from the ACC.”
Revenue role reversal
The past two decades have brought a stunning reversal, so much so that Phillips’ 2001 commentary seems like something out of a much more distant time. Listening to FSU officials these days, one might be forgiven for thinking the ACC had gone poor; that some of those trustees, themselves, were taking turns waiting for soup and rations in some sort of dystopian version of a college athletics bread line.
To the contrary, the ACC generated nearly $617 million in revenue during the 2021-22 fiscal year. It distributed about $40 million to each of its 14 full-time members. The problem, as is always the problem in these kinds of discussions, is that it wasn’t enough.
The Big Ten distributed an average of almost $60 million to its members, and the SEC more than $50 million to its. The gap between those two leagues and the ACC — and everyone — will grow even more substantial in the years to come. Indeed, the math isn’t good for the ACC. Its broadcast rights deal with ESPN extends another 13 years. The Big Ten and SEC, meanwhile, will both sign new TV deals between now and then, theoretically for even more money. The divide will undoubtedly continue to grow.
Thus the reasoning behind all the panic in Tallahassee, where administrators are concerned — perhaps rightfully — about receiving $30 million less television revenue than their counterparts in the two richest conferences. And yet the complaints come with a hint of hollowness. For one, Florida State, like the rest of the ACC’s membership, agreed to the conference’s deal with ESPN. And second, the university agreed to the ACC’s grant of rights, which binds member schools to the conference for the duration of that contract with ESPN.
Nobody forced FSU into accepting these terms. There were no complaints years ago, when the university entered into these agreements. And yet here we are, nonetheless, with Florida State huffing and puffing and apparently attempting to argue — perhaps in a courtroom, in a matter of time — its way out of the ACC.
FSU’s frustrations
Can FSU actually leave, given the grant of rights? Can it come up with the half a billion dollars or so — a rough estimate — to buy itself out of the conference? University officials are certainly talking the talk. But regardless of their ability, or inability, to navigate the grant of rights, the Seminoles have set their eventual exit in motion. You don’t talk like this if you’re hoping or planning things work out in staying.
For the ACC, this is something of a full-circle moment of irony. The big-money realities of college athletics, such as they were in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, forced the ACC to embrace the idea of inviting an outsider into its midst. And now, more than 30 years later, that outsider threatens to deliver what would likely be a fatal blow to the conference’s long-term survival, at least as we’ve come to know the ACC.
Not that FSU is the league’s only unhappy member. To varying degrees, officials at Clemson, Miami and North Carolina have all expressed frustration with the conference’s financial situation; concern about the reality that, yes, while the ACC continues to make more and more money, the Big Ten and SEC continue to make even more and more and more. Florida State, though, has become the loudest and angriest dissenter.
It is, perhaps, a predictable turn of events. I covered Florida State athletics between 2007 and 2011 for the Orlando Sentinel, during a period, toward the end of Bobby Bowden’s head coaching tenure, of particular angst. A few things quickly became clear during my time in Tallahassee: For one, the whims of the FSU football team determined the mood of not only the university but the entire city; one university official once told me he dreaded coming to work after a loss because of how miserable it felt to walk into the Moore Athletic Center.
Second, the FSU community — including administrators and coaches, as well as fans — harbored a distrust of the ACC. Down there, many viewed the league as too North Carolina-centric and too focused on its basketball roots. Florida State felt like an outsider, the way Maryland sometimes felt like an outsider before its departure. There was a portion of FSU supporters, and maybe even a majority, who never embraced the ACC and never felt the ACC embraced them.
And then there was this: the pressure. One day at lunch, a high-ranking member of Seminole Boosters drew a rough map of the state of Florida on a napkin. He drew a circle around Tallahassee, with much of the space inside the line spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The illustration, he said, showed how difficult FSU had it, given geography. It wasn’t all that close to any major city. It shared a region with schools — Alabama, Georgia, Florida — with much more established followings. Fundraising could be a challenge, especially when the Seminoles struggled.
The true allegiance
It’s not so surprising, then, that Florida State has become the ACC’s most outspoken rebel. It doesn’t share the historical connection to the conference, the way its remaining founding members do. In a way, FSU was a hired mercenary.
When its football program fell on hard times during Bowden’s final seasons, the university’s leadership was quick to turn on the man who single-handedly built Florida State into a national force. Facing the financial pressure that came amid swaths of empty seats at Doak Campbell Stadium, it fired Bowden at the conclusion of a 6-6 regular season in 2009, allowing him, at least, the dignity of going out a winner in the Gator Bowl.
And so there was one last moment of triumph then, with players carrying Bowden off the field in Jacksonville. It’s difficult to foresee a similarly happy ending for Florida State’s relationship with the conference it has called home for the past three decades. In some ways, it has always been more of a marriage of convenience and necessity as opposed to one built on harmony and mutual respect.
The ACC admitted Florida State because the conference felt it had to — FSU was “acceptable,” as Butters put it back then. Florida State joined the ACC because it felt it had to. The conference needed Florida State’s football prowess and television presence. Florida State, meanwhile, needed the ACC’s stability and basketball money. It was a win-win. Until it wasn’t. And now the forces that brought the two together appear likely to tear them apart.
Not a matter of if, as Weatherford put it, but when and how.
And so it has come to this. If FSU wasted little time amid hard times moving on from Bowden, it cannot be surprising that the university appears ready to move on from the ACC.
In college athletics, then like now, there’s an allegiance to only one thing.
This story was originally published August 4, 2023 at 4:18 PM with the headline "Florida State’s union with the ACC, born of necessity, is heading toward a messy end."
