Florida State places itself at center of realignment conversation

All of this is related. None of it is happening by accident. From Tallahassee to Seattle, within every conference in what used to be known as the Power 5, college sports finds itself at another inflection point. 

Now we wait for the next domino to fall. It’s possible one or two moves happen and the landscape goes dormant again. But this time, one potential outcome includes a chain reaction even more dramatic than any we’ve seen in any previous round of realignment.

We start with a pair of board meetings held fewer than 24 hours apart…

On Tuesday afternoon, the state of Arizona’s board of regents held a meeting that was streamed on the Web and presumably related to Arizona and Arizona State’s conference affiliation. The amount the public actually got to see? The call to order. Then on to executive session.

On Wednesday afternoon, Florida State’s board of trustees held a meeting that was streamed on the web. The entirety of this meeting was available to the public, and it included impassioned speeches from FSU president Rick McCullough and various trustees about why Florida State needs to leave the ACC if the conference can’t come up with a solution for a massive revenue gap between its schools and the schools of the Big Ten and SEC.

The money quote? “My current assessment of the situation after very deep analysis is that I believe that FSU will have to at some point consider very seriously leaving the ACC unless there were a radical change to the revenue distribution,” McCullough said.

That’s a sitting university president saying out loud in a public meeting that his school needs to leave its conference unless something changes. McCullough’s speech was followed by multiple — clearly planned — speeches from the trustees that backed the president. Spectacles such as this do not happen often. It’s a big deal.

There is a reason they don’t happen often, and the Arizona meeting helps explain why. The University of Arizona can leave the Pac-12 and go to the Big 12 if it wants. Arizona State, which also is controlled by the regents, probably can do the same. Tuesday’s meeting came after Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff delivered — essentially at gunpoint thanks to Arizona’s urging — the framework of a potential media rights deal that reportedly would see the conference partnering with Apple on a streaming venture. With two options on the table, Arizona’s board didn’t need to rally public sentiment or appeal to any outside entity. They needed to talk through some stuff, and they wanted to do it privately.

That’s how realignment usually works. You no comment, you lie, you keep it all quiet either until it’s time to make the move or someone finds out and leaks your move. The latter happened when Oklahoma and Texas planned to leave the Big 12 for the SEC and when USC and UCLA planned to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. In both cases, enough secret meetings had taken place that it was fine to simply admit what was happening. Arizona, Arizona State and Utah (which also could have a chance to join the Big 12) don’t need to say anything publicly now. All they need do is make a decision and either announce a move to the Big 12 or announce their intention to stay in the Pac-12.

Florida State is in a different situation, though. It is bound by a grant of rights agreement in the ACC that could mean the league owns the Seminoles’ broadcast rights until 2036. The only acceptable destinations for Florida State are the Big Ten and SEC, and it isn’t known at the moment whether either of those leagues would take Florida State even though adding the Seminoles would objectively improve the football offerings of either league. (More on the Big Ten and expansion in a few paragraphs.) Florida State’s president and trustees needed to put on a show for the following reasons:

• To let other ACC school administrations that might feel similarly that a fight is brewing.
• To let the Big Ten and SEC know the Seminoles are looking to move, and possibly within the next two years.
• To try to publicly pressure the ACC and the schools that want to stay in the ACC into negotiating a peaceful exit that doesn’t cost $500 million.

That last one is a tough ask, because the likes of Boston College, Syracuse and Wake Forest would be itching to squeeze every penny out of the Seminoles or any other school (Clemson, Miami and North Carolina come to mind) that might want to defect. All of the speeches in the Florida State trustees meeting were passionate, but none offered any details about how the school might extricate itself from its agreements with the ACC. They were pure red meat for fans frustrated that the schools Florida State recruits against are about to enjoy a TV money windfall that their school has no access to at the moment.

And those fans want action. ACC schools have until Aug. 15 to notify the conference of a plan to withdraw after this school year. Trustee Justin Roth suggested Wednesday that if Florida State can’t meet that deadline, it needs to have a plan to give a withdrawal notice by Aug. 15, 2024. That would put Florida State in another conference for the 2025 football season. 

What Florida State probably needs to make this viable is Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to all look at the potential Apple deal and decide to leave for the Big 12. That would leave the Pac-12 with six schools, and that’s where the Big Ten comes into the picture.

Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel reported Wednesday that a subgroup of Big Ten presidents has begun preliminary exploration of further expansion. Specifically, the group is assessing the viability of taking Oregon, Washington, Stanford and Cal if the Pac-12 implodes. If three more schools leave for the Big 12, the thinking goes, then the Big Ten didn’t deal the death blow. (Even though it probably really did when it swiped UCLA and USC.) Adding those four would give USC and UCLA partners on the West Coast. It would allow current Big Ten administrators to call Cal and Stanford administrators colleagues, which has nothing to do with sports but would matter to university presidents. It also would take the Big Ten to 20 schools.

For Florida State, there are two potentially helpful outcomes here. One is that the group examines those schools and decides expansion is OK but Fox — the network that drove the UCLA and USC acquisition — demands more marketable football brands than Stanford and Cal. One way to do this is to add another region not already in the Big Ten portfolio. Clemson and Florida State, which have combined to win three football national titles since 2013, could build monsters with Big Ten money. 

The other scenario that could work for Florida State is the Big Ten takes the four west coast schools and the SEC decides it needs to acquire more brands as well. We know the SEC covets North Carolina because it wants to logically expand the footprint. Clemson and Florida State are already in the SEC footprint and would get serious pushback from Auburn, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and probably Tennessee because those schools recruit against and/or compete on the field against Clemson and Florida State. But ask yourself this. If you added a tiger paw helmet and a spear helmet to one of those refrigerator magnet SEC schedules that include all the other helmets, would you watch those games? You absolutely would.

Still, none of this is guaranteed even if three schools do leave the Pac-12 for the Big 12. The Big Ten may decide 16 is enough. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has said his league has no appetite for further expansion at the moment. And the truth is that neither league will know how difficult it is to manage a 16-team league until they actually do it beginning next year. Plus, an 18- or 20-team league doesn’t even feel like a conference. It feels like two conferences.

If the Power 2 elect to keep their ranks closed, would Florida State just be stuck? 

Hopefully Florida State administrators have a plan that goes deeper than a burning passion to get out of the ACC. Because a lot of moving parts have to click into place for them to wind up where they want.

“If this is a game of chicken,” Florida State trustee Deborah Sergeant said Wednesday. “I hope it’s not.”