Florida State president 'not satisfied' with how much money school currently gets from ACC media deal
Richard McCullough's comments on the ACC's TV deal come as the Pac-12 may be on the brink of collapse
As the Big Ten has held preliminary talks about adding teams from the Pac-12, Florida State president Richard McCullough said during a Board of Regents meeting Wednesday that the school should consider leaving the ACC unless it starts to receive more money from the conference’s media rights deals.
Florida State and the other 13 schools in the ACC are currently locked into a media rights deal with ESPN through 2036. While the conference distributed nearly $40 million per school over the course of the 2021-22 school year, the ACC’s revenue is still smaller than that of the Big Ten and the SEC.
The ACC’s current deal expires after the Big Ten’s deal that kicks in next year with the addition of USC and UCLA. McCullough and other trustees are well aware of that and want Florida State to get more money, even if they're unclear on how that goal can be achieved.
“We of, course, are not satisfied with our current situation,” McCullough said. “We love the ACC. We love our partners at ESPN. Our goal would be to continue to stay in the ACC, but staying in the ACC under 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.”
McCullough even said Florida State was possibly facing an "existential crisis" if it remained in the ACC.
“With the large media deals that have been made with places like the Big Ten and the SEC, which in many ways are creating — maybe it’s an exaggeration — an existential crisis perhaps for Florida State University as we will be $30 million per school per year behind in our gap in conference distribution,” McCullough said.
Former FSU quarterback and current trustee Drew Weatherford went a step further and said that he believed it wasn’t a matter of “if” Florida State left the ACC for a conference with more money, it was a matter of “when.”
Another trustee said that he wanted the school to have a plan for getting out of the ACC’s current media deal within the next 12 months.
How does FSU get out of the deal?
While Florida State’s power brokers made sure to publicly show how unhappy they are with the ACC’s revenue compared to the Big Ten's and SEC's, there weren’t any ideas for how the school could feasibly leave the conference. That plan could take more than 12 months to form if it even forms at all. McCullough even admitted there are “no easy fixes to this problem.”
“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," he said. "I think this continues to be a difficult issue. There’s a lot going on in the world of conference realignment with the [Pac-12] deal imminent and lots of things going on.”
The long-term grant-of-rights deal Florida State agreed to along with the rest of the conference makes it nearly impossible for the school to leave anytime in the near future. Unless Florida State spent lots of money for attorneys to somehow find a legal loophole, FSU would have to forfeit all the future revenue it would get from the ACC through 2036 if it went to a new conference.
That’s simply not worth it. SEC schools got $50 million in 2021-22 and are set to make more when the league’s new TV deal with ESPN kicks in next football season. But the gap between the SEC and Big Ten and the ACC means it would take years for Florida State to start receiving full payments from its new league unless it got out of the grant-of-rights agreement.
In short, the discussion Wednesday was mostly for show. But in the current world of college athletics, it might also have been a sign that the future of the Pac-12 isn’t the only domino that’s wobbling.
