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Don’t think of the ACC’s pending settlement with Florida State and Clemson, which will ostensibly end their wandering eyes for now, as the final say in where those two schools will play football.
Instead, think of it like “Jurassic Park.”
For now, the ACC’s relationship with those two fidgety members has been placed in amber, suspended in time, just like the dinosaur DNA that scientists eventually unlocked in the novel/movie.
But college sports isn’t going to have to wait several millennia before letting the hungry velociraptors out of their cages. It’s only going to take until 2030.
Because that’s the year all hell is going to break loose in college sports.
If you think things have been chaotic the last few years with realignment, revenue sharing, unfettered transfers and NIL, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Just wait until the Big 12’s television deal expires in 2031, followed by the Big Ten’s in 2032 and the SEC’s in 2034. Oh, and it just so happens that the College Football Playoff and the NCAA’s March Madness media contracts will be up for renewal at the same time as the Big Ten.
What that means, in essence, is that 2030 — when all those negotiations will start to percolate — is the date when anything and everything will be on the table.
Further expansion of the SEC and Big Ten beyond their already bloated footprints? Some kind of merger into a superleague that mimics the NFL? A breakaway from the NCAA? Some type of hybrid where fully professionalized schools play in one division and everyone else has their own rules?
Maybe litigation slows all this down if the next phase of college sports causes economic harm to enough major universities who end up on the wrong side of the dividing line. Maybe Congress gets involved. Maybe it doesn’t.
The point is, nobody can really predict how things will play out once the negotiations start in 2030. But something’s going to happen — something big and probably transformational.
And guess what?
It just so happens that 2030 is when Clemson and Florida State will be able to leave the ACC for less than $100 million, according to reports in both ESPN and On3, as part of the new agreement.
Of course there are some other interesting parts of the settlement, including a formula that will calculate part of the ACC’s media-rights distribution based on television ratings. That will likely give Clemson, Florida State and a few others a bump in revenue over the next few years, assuming both schools’ trustees and the league’s lawyers all sign off and make the settlement official.
But that’s relatively small potatoes compared to changes in the league’s exit-fee structure, which was the main point of contention that sparked the lawsuits in the first place.
According to the ACC’s grant of rights agreement, leaving the conference before the expiration of its deal with ESPN in 2036 would have resulted in massive penalties. We’re talking perhaps half a billion dollars.
Though there was no clear legal path for Clemson and Florida State to get out of that contract and no conference willing to take those schools immediately, taking the lawsuit all the way wasn’t a guaranteed win for the ACC either. With these things, you never know for sure.
When you factor in the legal fees, the intra-conference rancor and the general instability of having two members actively suing the league in hopes of leaving, you can understand why the ACC settled.
Based on the reported terms of the deal, things should — and we stress should — calm down for the foreseeable future. The ACC will likely survive in its current form until at least 2030. That’s a win for commissioner Jim Phillips.
But after that? All bets are off.
Because the DNA of this dispute, and the insatiable gluttony of college sports, is still buried in that resin, just waiting to be revived. When it’s negotiating time for the Big 12, Big Ten and SEC, the next form of college sports will start to take shape, just as it has every single time the TV deals are up for grabs.
Five years isn’t necessarily a long time, but it’s an eternity in both the media and college sports landscape. Will the world be more oriented toward streaming deals when the Big Ten and SEC do their next negotiations? Will they need more members to add value? Will they merge in some way? Will college football be a completely separate economic entity from all the other sports?
These are the key questions we won’t have answers to until things start to happen in 2030 and 2031. But from Florida State and Clemson’s perspective, this settlement at least gives them the ability to get in the game. If they were financially locked all the way into the ACC deal until 2036, it would have been a lot more difficult for those two schools (and other highly-valued brands like North Carolina, Virginia and Miami) to make themselves available when the feeding frenzy begins.
It makes the long-term future of the ACC a bit murky, but let’s be honest – that’s the case across college sports right now. Getting some short-term stability is probably worth that trade-off.
But make no mistake, there are T-Rexes and raptors and all kinds of vicious creatures being held back from destroying everything in their wake, waiting for the day they can throw college sports into chaos again.
For the last couple of years, as Clemson and Florida State have made noise about leaving, the ACC was at risk of being eaten alive. Now we have a defined date — and a number — when the gates swing open.
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