The public institution filed suit against the Atlantic Coast Conference in late December.
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FLORIDA STATE SEMINOLES
In the month of December, Florida State fans and college football enthusiasts alike witnessed two monumental moments in the sport: The undefeated, Power Five conference champion Seminoles being left out of the College Football Playoff (CFP) in favor of Texas and Alabama (an SEC school and a future SEC school) and the FSU Board of Trustees suing the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) to challenge the Grant of Rights and leave for good.
Recent developments have tied those two moments together legally.
Since Selection Sunday in early December, cries of collusion between ESPN (a network that has committed significantly more money to the SEC) and the CFP have circulated into a wide-ranging plethora of theories regarding what happened behind the scenes, if anything at all.
For instance, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody sent a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to the CFP Selection Committee in early January demanding “all communications” to or from the Southeastern Conference (SEC), Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and ESPN, and all 10 conferences in FBS football, as well as the compensation of Committee members.
Moody’s office also called for a public release of the Multi-Media Agreement between the ACC and ESPN, the 2014 Amended Multi-Media Agreement, the ACC Grant of Rights Agreement, as well as “any other executed agreements between the ACC and the Walt Disney Company.”
To fuel the flames of that possibility, ESPN accused Florida State of potentially committing a felony in late February for attempting to unseal the “textbook trade secrets” of the ACC’s Grant of Rights deal.
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Moreover, since those two moments existed on the same timeline, Florida State University has never addressed these two instances as a possibly related event.
However, in a recent development in the ongoing lawsuits between FSU and the ACC, the public institution is requesting “All Documents and Communications related to the decision by the College Football Playoff Committee to exclude Florida State from the championship series for the 2023-2024 college football season,” as reported by Skip Foster, President of PR firm Hammerhead Communications and former Publisher of the Tallahassee Democrat.
Now that the results of the CFP and the ACC lawsuit are officially intertwined, the scope of the legal action could reach unprecedented levels..
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