Fifteen months after the Florida State-ACC saga officially began in December of 2023, it ended this week.

FSU's Board of Trustees unanimously voted to approve a settlement with the Atlantic Coast Conference on Tuesday afternoon that will bring its lawsuit to an end and keep the Seminoles in the conference under a revised media-rights distribution deal.

The FSU BoT went into closed session for approximately 30 minutes after opening the meeting to discuss the terms of the settlement before agreeing to the deal.

FSU general counsel Carolyn Egan shared a presentation before the vote, which said that the new media-rights distribution model will see 60% of the ACC's base media rights placed into a pool that will be distributed according to a five-year rolling model of television ratings and average viewership.

Clemson, which also voted to agree to the settlement Tuesday afternoon, shared more specific details in its presentation. According to Clemson, it presents the opportunity for the most-heavily-viewed teams to earn as much as $120 million in additional revenue over the next six years compared the previous even-split model.

Considering FSU is perennially atop the ACC in viewership and was even among the top few teams in 2024 despite a 2-10 record, this new model should be highly favorable for FSU and help make up a decent portion of the deficit it was previously facing relative to SEC and Big Ten teams.

"What you're going to see represents a large paradigm shift in revenue sharing and conference exit with media rights from the world that we lived in before..." Egan said during her presentation. "We have a very tight grip on what our brand is and what our viewership numbers are. We know that regardless, year over year, our viewership is steady for decades. People watch us. Maybe they love watch us, maybe they hate watch us, but they watch us."

Additionally, success initiatives will remain in place going forward under the new agreement and schools that make the College Football Playoff will keep all of their participant shares instead of sharing with other conference teams ($4 million for a first-round appearance up to $20 million for an appearance in the national championship game). This means FSU could take an even larger portion of the ACC's revenue if it has football or men's basketball success over the next few seasons.

Another uncertainty that has been resolved because of this settlement is setting in stone firm guidelines for how much it will cost for schools to leave the ACC before the Grant of Rights deal is up in 2036.

Under the prior deal, it was uncertain if schools would be able to take their media rights with them even if they paid the conference exit fee. Sources confirmed to the Osceola that after the settlement, it'll cost $165 million for a school to leave the ACC with full media rights intact during the 2026 fiscal year, with that number scaling down by $18 million per year until it settles at $75 million in 2030-31.

Considering the current Big Ten TV deal is up at the end of the 2029-30 academic year, the timing of the exit fee decreases aligns well so that FSU would be able to potentially enter the conference with a full television share in four years at the cost of $93 million to leave the ACC.

"I so appreciate all the hard work that got put into this..." FSU president Richard McCullough said. "(FSU's legal team) did everything right and really helped us to break down some of the iron-clad nature of some of this and helped us get leverage, which was helpful not only for Florida State but for the entire ACC league."

While the FSU board talked at length during its meeting in December 2023 when it opened a lawsuit against the ACC about how it would be willing to find a way out of the ACC if the conference wasn't going to help FSU be able to compete nationally with the top athletic departments in the country, the board members are now quite satisfied with how the conference met the university's demands.

"We're way better off than where we were 14 months ago, when we were being told we had no options. Now we have options and we have a good fit, I think, for the conference as well..." chairman of the FSU Board of Trustees Peter Collins said during the meeting. "This is good for Florida State. This is really good for Florida State. I know there's still a lot of people that don't have a lot of details, and most of those details will come out. But when people learn more — and not just what they hear anecdotally on the internet — they'll agree that it's a good outcome for Florida State. We wouldn't be here today approving this if it wasn't a good outcome for Florida State."

While the settlement was agreed to by FSU, Clemson and the ACC on Tuesday, Collins said it will take up to 30 days for the legal documents to be finalized.

As far as the ACC is concerned, it may only be a short-term fix to a long-term problem for the conference. But in that short term, it's easy to see quite a few ways FSU should benefit from this new agreement.

"I'm proud of where we landed. We made some commitments 14 months ago that we would do everything in our power to ensure that we could compete at the highest level. I think we've done that here," FSU board member Drew Weatherford said. "We also made it clear that we were willing to seek a new home if something drastically didn't change, but the good news is that things have drastically changed since we had that conversation for our benefit."

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