Florida State blows up Cal, Stanford in fiery ACC lawsuit

Florida State University sued the ACC on Friday morning, with the apparent intention of getting a court to give it a cheaper way out of the conference. Right now, to ditch the ACC would cost the school more than $500 million. Florida State’s argument is that the ACC made decisions that “appear dedicated to self-preservation and self-perpetuation over the fiscal well-being of its members,” with one highlighted decision being the addition of Stanford, Cal and Dallas-based Southern Methodist University.

In the filing, Florida State makes it clear how the school, which has competed in the ACC for more than 30 years, feels about the newest entrants into the conference. But in trashing its soon-to-be conference-mates, Florida State sure seems to have gotten a whole lot wrong, too.

Take the section discussing how adding Stanford, Cal and SMU will “dilute” and “diminish” the ACC for future bids to the College Football Playoff (CFP). It’s an especially personal and aggrieved point for the school because the Seminoles did not make this year’s playoff despite their 13-0 record, getting passed over for a 12-1 Alabama.

“This will necessarily handicap ACC members vying for a position in future CFPs against peers from the other Power Four conferences, including peers with inferior won-loss records,” the lawsuit reads. “Perhaps the most telling metric of the lack of media caché those new ACC members carry, one has forfeited all media payments otherwise due it as a ‘member’ of the ACC, while the other two forfeited approximately 66% of that payout … for the next several years.”

Logically, this does not make a ton of sense. Yes, Florida State was passed over in this season’s CFP for the fourth and final spot, a committee decision that is really hard to explain. But this is the final season of a four-team playoff, as the CFP expands to 12 starting next year. There seems to be no merit in the “future CFPs” argument, because future CFPs are already going to look completely different.

On top of that, the addition of Stanford and Cal is only happening because the Pac-12 dissolved, which is what dropped the number of “power” conferences from five to four. The current plan for the 12-team playoff has six automatic bids coming to conference champions, with the top four seeds reserved specifically for conference champions only, but the automatic bids will likely drop from six to five before next season.

In this year’s CFP, Florida State was ranked as the fifth-best conference champion by the CFP committee. But by next year, the four teams who did make the playoff will actually be in just two conferences: Pac-12 champion Washington is headed to the Big Ten, which Michigan won, and Big 12 champ Texas is joining the SEC and current champion Alabama. If Florida State’s 2024 is similarly strong to their 2023, they will likely be the third-best conference champion — and seemingly be in a better position BECAUSE they play in the ACC.

Florida State went one step further in dumping on Stanford and Cal’s football programs, using a single writer’s ranking of every college football team in the country to prove a point. Problem is, that point also comes with some rather notable flaws.

“Of the four remaining Pac-12 teams, Oregon State stood alone having finished this season ranked number 22 in the polls, while Cal was ranked number 56 and Stanford number 94 (out of a possible 133). … Just as last year, this year Stanford and Cal finished in the bottom half of the Pac-12 in football standings,” the lawsuit reads, citing a single article by The Athletic’s Chris Vannini for the rankings. “In demonstration that the ACC had missed the point of conference realignment, in making its ‘strategic’ conference realignment move, the ACC skipped over Oregon State in favor of Cal and Stanford, a recognition the ACC did not appreciate what had driven the Power Four Conference realignment in the first instance — Tier I media value in football.”

It is right to acknowledge that the Beavers surged under head coach Jonathan Smith, who led Oregon State to 10 wins in 2022 and a strong 8-4 season this year. But Smith has now left to coach at Michigan State, and it’s fair to point out that Oregon State won a combined nine games from 2015 to 2018, Smith’s first season there. We’re not talking about a perennial powerhouse in the Beavers here.

But also, the media value argument Florida State makes ignores pure demographic metric data. The Bay Area is ranked by Nielsen as the 10th-largest television market in the United States, with around double the television households as Portland (ranked No. 22), the closest major city to Corvallis that was measured. For the ACC, there is far more value in getting the conference’s television network into the Bay Area than Portland.

Whether Florida State’s full legal argument has any validity will play out in the days and weeks ahead. The ACC pushed back at the school in a statement and also quietly filed its own lawsuit on Thursday night, arguing that Florida State is not allowed to challenge the conference’s grant of rights because Florida State signed it and has benefited from it since then. But if any Stanford or Cal fan who felt awkward about the move thought all would be well once the schools joined the ACC in the summer, Florida State just guaranteed that tension isn’t going away.