Step Back From the College Sports Bubble and You’ll See How Absurd FSU’s Money Grab Is

Máximo Ramírez and his wife, Vaicha, live on the side of an Andean mountain in San Nicolás, Peru. They’re old, but every day they roll up their sleeping mats on the dirt floor of their adobe hut—perched nearly 10,000 feet above sea level—and go out to farm their land. They grow potatoes and other crops, working with rudimentary tools.

Vaicha was tending to a row of plants outside her hut last week when we arrived on foot, out of breath from the steep hike. Máximo was working farther up the mountain. They know my daughter, Brooke, who lives with their son and daughter-in-law in San Nicolás while doing a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. Vaicha, dressed in traditional rural mountain garb—a skirt with tights, a sweater and a tall, brimmed hat—left her work to greet us.

She gently clasped our hands in her own mud-caked hands and kissed them. She apologized for not having any soup to offer us.

The day after we met the Ramírezes, word started to leak that Florida State University was poised to move forward with plans to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference. The reason: The Seminoles’ athletic department simply cannot maintain its standard of living on expected 2024 media-rights revenue of about $44 million, and an overall athletic budget of about $160 million.

The FSU news provided a jarring juxtaposition. One day I was witnessing a level of poverty that is difficult to even comprehend, yet these people were willing to share what little they had. The very next day I’m reading about the latest escalation of entitlement in college football, where nobody wants to share anything. Go Noles.

The same hard-to-justify comparisons could be written about many facets of life in developing vs. wealthier countries, like ours. But I write about college athletics. I’m part of the ravenous machine and have made a good living within it. And currently King Football is at the greediest point in its 150-plus-year history—lacking in self-discipline, immune to shame, accustomed to getting its way from feckless university presidents, unwilling to work for the common good, addicted to the injections of TV money, divorced from the rest of campus, gripped by the fear of falling behind in the arms race.

The destruction of much of what made college athletics great in the first place has gone up-tempo. Conferences are collapsing, regionality is a joke, Olympic sports are in peril, the academic underpinning of higher education is endangered by the increasingly real prospect of unlimited transfers. It might soon be time to kick football off-campus, making it a fully professional sport. License out nicknames, school colors and other trappings associated with the universities, rent the stadiums on Saturdays and practice facilities during the week, but otherwise the players and coaches would have nothing to do with actual college.

Sounds charming, doesn’t it?

None of this is to say Florida State is committing the original sin here. It’s merely the latest example. Texas and Oklahoma began detonating the landscape in 2021, USC and UCLA followed in ’22, then the rest of the Pac-12 schools fled for their own money grabs this year. With a growing revenue gap between the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten and everyone else, the ACC is the next vulnerable target in the power consolidation game.

The thing that pushes this particular grab for cash over the top is the ACC’s grant of rights agreement—signed by Florida State in 2016—that theoretically binds the league’s members together until 2036. But honoring a contract is for suckers. The school wants out at what could be a staggering loss of revenue—at least $350 million according to some estimates, perhaps up to $500 million—with no clear landing place. It is one of the most brazen power plays in college sports history and it could trigger the most upheaval in college sports history.

It could set in motion the annihilation of the ACC, or at least a vast diminishing of the conference, because if FSU pulls this off then others will follow. Clemson has been considered “very connected” to FSU, per a well-placed ACC source earlier this year. Miami would be the third football-first ACC school that could bail. And all of that could free up North Carolina and Virginia, which have been considered the two most desirable ACC properties for both the SEC and Big Ten. They would open up new TV markets in new states while keeping the SEC geographically contiguous, and their academic cachet could be valuable (no, really).

Does the SEC want Florida State? Initial indications are no. There is resistance within the league and it stands to reason that ESPN—which is the media hub for both the SEC and ACC—would be opposed to the destruction of a league it has under contract for 13 more years at an advantageous rate. But if it comes down to a choice between losing the Noles to the Big Ten or taking them, the SEC’s stance might change.

The hard-charging, already-bloated Big 12—which will have 16 members starting next year—presumably would take anyone that adds football value. The Seminoles, Tigers and (to a lesser extent) Hurricanes would do that.

Florida State used its snub from the College Football Playoff—a bad decision in a no-win situation for the CFP selection committee— as the catalyst for the push to sue its way out of the ACC. But being passed over the four-team playoff could be considered cover for what the school has wanted to do for months, if not years.

In August, some in the ACC believed the Seminoles would file to leave the league before the Aug. 15 deadline for membership in 2024. That date came and went, but the intent to leave never died. Instead, the idea was to take a longer runway into a quantum leap. The idea of waiting 365 more days to declare [it wanted to leave the league] is not the concept,” one ACC source familiar with FSU’s thinking told Sports Illustrated.

So now that bell has been rung. Florida State has sued the ACC. The ACC has sued Florida State. Life is just intolerable trying to get by on a budget of $160 million.

Despite that onerous financial burden, the Seminoles somehow had enough nickels to rub together to build a 63-person football staff under head coach Mike Norvell, according to the athletic department’s website. They had enough money to pay Norvell $8 million this year. They had enough program momentum to go 13–0. ACC schools, disadvantaged as they are, have somehow won three of the last 10 college football national championships and played in two other title games. The league somehow won four national titles this fall alone in Olympic sports.

You’d think times are pretty good in the ACC. But there always is a demand for more, more, more. Florida State is poised to smash its commitment to the league to satisfy its endless hunger.

We could all benefit from the perspective that would come with grabbing a pickaxe and hacking out a living on a remote mountainside in the Andes. But few of us need that perspective more today than the entitled power brokers of College Sports Inc.