TALLAHASSEE — Sometime in the summer of 1995, Florida State’s president took a black pen to the bottom righthand corner of a letter and scrawled the question threatening to blow up the college football landscape of 2024.
“Are we comfortable with our TV and other media rights?” Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte wrote.
The answer, at the time, was yes. FSU administrator Frank Murphy told his president the Atlantic Coast Conference “will not bother us on our underwriting dollars.” No reason to add TV rights to the next ACC council agenda.
“However,” Murphy continued, “let’s be vigilant for anything that affects our abilities to raise revenue from TV/radio underwriting that connects with Olympic-type sports (baseball, etc.).”
After almost three decades of vigilance, the answer to D’Alemberte’s question has changed. The dueling lawsuits between the Seminoles and ACC center on FSU’s deep discomfort — if not distress — from the value of FSU’s TV rights. The ‘Noles fear the league’s ESPN payouts can no longer raise enough revenue to fund elite programs in football, baseball, softball and everything else.
Which means the first premonition of the ongoing, nine-figure litigation might reside in a two-sentence memo tucked away in Folder F14, Box 5, collection HUA 2018-064 of the FSU libraries’ special collections and archives.
Spend a couple afternoons at the Claude Pepper Library and Robert Manning Strozier Library — as the Tampa Bay Times recently did — and you’ll stumble upon other historical documents that read differently in the present uncertainty over the Seminoles’ ACC future.
Other conference options
The first conference realignment allusion we found came in the minutes of a March 1990 meeting. FSU’s athletic board discussed three possibilities:
• FSU’s non-football home, the Metro Conference, could add up to four teams
• The ‘Noles could pursue an all-sports conference with Miami, South Carolina, Pitt, Virginia Tech, Syracuse, West Virginia, Boston College, Rutgers and Temple
• FSU could do nothing
Neither the ACC nor the SEC was mentioned.
By the end of that summer, FSU’s president, then Bernard “Bernie” F. Sliger, felt comfortable discussing what he called the “SEC/ACC/Expanded Metro Conference vs. Independent Issue.” Sort of.
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Explore all your options“I expect the most encouraging declaration I can make,” he said at a 1990 kickoff luncheon, “is that we are seeking the best possible and most expert financial and sociological advice.”
From Burt Reynolds and Deion Sanders, he said (jokingly, we assume). Sliger said former football coach Bill Peterson cautioned him that the state is too flat to succeed in “that coasting conference.” Reynolds, naturally, recommended measuring the fields and picking the one with “The Longest Yard.”
Joining the ACC
A turning point came in June 1990 when the Big Ten voted to add Penn State — a football independent like FSU. Three months later, Sliger accepted the ACC’s offer.
“(I)f we did not get into a conference, we were going to be out there alone,” Sliger said, according to a news conference transcript in The Osceola. “Sometimes we may think we are as good as Notre Dame, I don’t believe that is actually the case, at least yet.”
Sliger said he agonized over the decision more than any in his tenure. When did he stop?
“I haven’t.”
ACC vs. SEC
Two weeks after Florida State picked the ACC, LSU chancellor William E. Davis wrote Sliger with “profound sadness” about Sliger’s impending retirement and the fact that “we were unable to entice your university to become a member of the SEC.”
“The natural rivalries and good fellowship afforded by Florida State University were most attractive,” Davis wrote.
Davis added that he was looking forward to seeing Sliger soon — an apparent reference to LSU’s upcoming game at FSU. “Please take it easy on us … our kids are little but slow and very young and inexperienced.”
The 12th-ranked Seminoles won 42-3.
After Tigers athletic director Joe Dean publicly complained about FSU’s conduct, he wrote Sliger (a former LSU administrator) to apologize.
“Actually,” Dean wrote, “it’s a tribute to your institution, both athletically and academically, because if I had not, along with other members of this league, felt so strongly about your membership, then nothing ever would have been said.
“I still feel that, athletically, you made a mistake because I think your program deserves to play at the highest level, and, because of your geographical location, Florida State fits perfectly in the Southeastern Conference.”
Sliger replied that he would have been “very, very comfortable in the SEC” and “overjoyed” with either. “Our coaches, faculty, and athletic board wanted the ACC very badly, however.”
As faculty representative Chuck Ehrhardt put it in The Osceola: “I think it is unusual in the university setting, particularly with faculty to get unanimity on anything, but there was a genuine unanimous feeling that this was the right thing for Florida State to do at this time …”
‘Nesting grounds of unwholesome competitiveness’
If there were any other objections to the ACC, we didn’t find them in the FSU libraries’ Bernard F. Sliger Collection.
“Not putting Florida State in the Southeastern Conference was THE best decision …” FSU alumnus Philip A. Browning wrote. “As most Seminoles would say …'The Gators can stick it in their ear!’”
Former Gov. LeRoy Collins praised the move, saying other unnamed options — presumably the SEC — “would have been nesting grounds of unwholesome competitiveness.”
The broad support had nothing to do with athletics. FSU “put itself in a league with schools of solid academic reputation,” wrote George Bedell, a former Board of Regents interim chancellor.
“Football teams come and go,” former Georgia administrator Leonard Kraft wrote, “the academic history of an institution brings lasting fame.”
Money matters
FSU and the ACC are litigating a withdrawal payment (about $140 million) and TV rights if the ’Noles leave (more than $400 million). Those numbers make FSU’s entrance fee laughable.
The ACC’s commissioner sought $500,000 (one-eighth of the league’s assets), according to The Osceola’s transcript. That’s $1.2 million in today’s dollars — less than 1% of the cheaper part of a modern exit.
In 1995, FSU’s president (D’Alemberte) received a request to send $700,000 in bowl revenue to the library. The idea concerned athletic director Dave Hart, who was already transferring $2 million from sports to the school.
“We have to enhance our scholarship endowment and build a reserve,” Hart wrote to D’Alemberte. “If we fail to do this, we will find ourselves in dire straits as we enter the next decade. We have Gender Equity and Facility demands that must remain a high priority.”
Twenty-nine years later, little has changed.
‘Such a fine conference!’
Despite occasional concerns and foreshadowing, the special collections files we perused were generally positive toward the ACC.
There’s a shiny ‘90s Christmas card from the league. D’Alemberte thanked commissioner Eugene F. Corrigan for a “handsome” basketball tournament watch. And in December 1995 — a few months after he wondered about TV rights — D’Alemberte wrote the league office with gratitude for the “wonderful surprise gift of the beautiful ACC Throw.”
“Thanks again for all your support of collegiate athletics at The Florida State University,” he wrote. “We have certainly enjoyed being a part of such a fine conference!”
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