Florida State University faces an important deadline in the coming days: whether to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference. The school has been a member since 1991.
Driving the decision are recent shifts in college athletics that have brought about highly paid amateur athletes, and big-money television deals. FSU’s decision will have a major financial impact either way.
The conundrum is one of finances and exposure: If Florida State stays in the ACC it risks losing out on tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue. That money, gleaned largely from the school’s biggest sport, football, often helps subsidize other sports and even academic programs. But should FSU leave, it’ll cost them; some reports have put the figure at a minimum of $130 million to leave the conference.
The figure does not include additional costs for breaking the TV rights contracts, nor does it consider whether that’s even doable. There’s a lot that would have to be untangled because FSU and the other conference members effectively sold their rights to the ACC, which in turn, sold them to ESPN for an undisclosed amount of money.
FSU has to make its departure decision by August 15th. If the school waits past that date, it will have resigned itself to another year in a conference where the relationship has become strained. FSU’s president, athletics director, and board of trustees have recently spoken about increasing revenue gaps between the university’s programs and others of the same or similar size at other competing institutions.
