For the Florida State Seminoles, what has made the start of the 2024 college football so rewarding is they at last can blame their athletic failures on the Atlantic Coast Conference and stand unchallenged on the facts.
Georgia Tech 24, Florida State 21: ACC’s fault.
Boston College 28, Florida State 13: ACC’s fault.
No court in the land will dispute this.
Florida State’s prior complaints about their conference partners and the league headquarters have led to suits and countersuits – but also a public relations battle in which the Seminoles have been about as successful as in their first two football games. The arrogance infesting not so much the athletic department, but rather those running the university as a whole, has led to them now posing a challenge to Notre Dame as this sport’s most unpopular team.
The national enmity for Notre Dame is of the sort accorded the Cowboys and Yankees: too much attention over too long a period of time eventually wears on fans of other teams. The Irish have built toward their status over the course of nearly a century. Florida State got this done in nine months. That’s an achievement, don’t you think?
“I always thought that the way to get ACC people together is that galvanizing force, and the galvanizing force would be to dunk on the SEC. I was wrong,” veteran North Carolina broadcaster Joe Ovies declared Tuesday on the “Ovies and Giglio” podcast. “The thing that has actually brought ACC people together is Florida State.”
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Sympathy for Florida State is long gone
There was substantial national sympathy for the Seminoles football program when they were shafted by the College Football Playoff committee last December. They compiled a perfect record that included an ACC Championship victory but were excluded from the phony CFP field because they’d lost their starting quarterback to injury and thus were less likely to be competitive in a semifinal game. It didn’t matter that they’d earned their place; what mattered was what sort of TV show it would be.
FSU blew through all that goodwill like a shopaholic let loose on Chicago’s Miracle Mile. Former school president John Thrasher told the Tallahassee Democrat, “It gives me hope the leadership at FSU will look at other places to be. I think it shows we are a secondary-level conference,” which was followed soon after by the university suing the league for “mismanaging media rights and imposing ‘draconian’ exit fees", in the words of its public relations department.
Such FSU pooh-bahs as university president Rick McCullough and board chair Peter Collins complained a year ago about the ACC television contract, after it became public where the broadcast numbers for the expanded Big Ten and Southeastern Conference were headed. It’s not clear why their institution agreed to the deal with ESPN, and to the leaguewide grant-of-rights that binds FSU to the league for as long as the next dozen years. Was there really no one involved who could have anticipated rival conferences getting substantial increases on their next contracts?
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Around the same time, FSU quarterback turned private equity investor Drew Weatherford said during an FSU board of trustees meeting, “Unless something drastic changes on the revenue side at the ACC, it’s not a matter of if we leave, in my opinion. It’s a matter of how and when we leave.”
Clemson’s also suing the ACC, and they probably deserve just as much backlash, but it’s mostly been accorded Florida State because they’ve talked so doggone much.
These statements always have assumed Florida State will have somewhere more lucrative to go if they can depart the ACC. There are only two college sports conferences that fit that description, and it’s no lock either the SEC or Big Ten will be eager to grow in that direction.
Seminoles supporters can point to last year’s average TV audience of 3.57 million, seventh in the nation, but they were only 15th in 2022 (behind TCU) and 25th in 2021 (behind Minnesota). There’s no significant evidence adding them will make current league members wealthier; logic says having FSU in the conference would have a significant impact on the in-state hegemony of current SEC member Florida.
It’s too easily forgotten around Tallahassee how much good the ACC has done for Florida State athletics. The Seminoles were an independent as recently as 1990. Becoming a member of the conference contributed substantially to success in men’s basketball (12 NCAA Tournament appearances since, including six Sweet 16s), women’s soccer (14 College Cup appearances and four NCAA titles), softball (10 Women’s College World Series appearances and one title), baseball (14 College World Series trips) and, yes, even football (all three of the school’s claimed national titles and its three Heisman winners).
That Florida State would disregard that history and its own prior decisions and launch a costly campaign to escape a conference in which it is 0-2 to start 2024 has helped make it a punchline.
My goodness, college football journalist Brett McMurphy is sharing so many jokes on Twitter, it seems like he’s auditioning for a Netflix standup special:
“Current ACC scoreboard … Teams suing the ACC: 0-3 Teams not suing ACC: 15-2.”
“Weird stat: no college football teams suing their current conference has won this season.”
“Breaking: Florida State adding to its ACC lawsuits to force expansion of @CFBPlayoff from 12 to 112 teams this season.”
They’re not laughing with you, Florida State. They’re laughing at you.