Florida State is, unequivocally, America’s college football program of the moment. You might demand otherwise because of a personal connection or empirical data, but it’s impossible to find a school that exceeds Florida State’s current circumstances. The Seminoles are simply more American than any of us want to admit.
To be clear, none of those circumstances involve actual college football, although it’s relevant to the situation that Florida State will probably be very good on the field in 2024. Coach Mike Norvell is arguably the nation’s best at balancing program development between high school recruiting and cherry picking from the transfer portal. His new quarterback, Oregon State transfer DJ Uiagalelei, is a solid bet to lead the Seminoles to their 17th ACC championship en route to the College Football Playoff.
On Saturday, the Seminoles will face Georgia Tech in Dublin to kick off the season in a showpiece for ESPN. This kind of platforming is ostensibly an honor — and free marketing if nothing else — but Seminoles fans remain convinced ESPN is in cahoots against the well being of their program. Last season, an undefeated Florida State team was rejected by the selection committee of the College Football Playoff, an event ESPN holds exclusive broadcast rights to.
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Eight months later, ESPN is sending its flagship program, “College GameDay,” to Ireland in part to fete a Seminoles team the network’s programming and pundits spent months denigrating. The gist of the playoff committee’s on-the-record reasoning for excluding Florida State in favor of a one-loss Alabama team was that injuries to the Seminoles’ quarterback at the time of the selection made them a weaker pick. This, understandably, was not received well by the school’s supporters.
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Was Alabama a better team because it won a better conference? Maybe, but after months of watching ESPN mouthpieces such as Paul Finebaum and “GameDay” co-host Kirk Herbstreit openly mocking their circumstances, Florida State fans felt validated in their suspicion. (Those same fans also provided fuel for those hot takes by ceaselessly hectoring ESPN pundits, but today’s muddied editorial landscape of broadcast rights agreements has made it hard to discern whether the pig you shouldn’t wrestle is the crazy message board poster or the glib TV host.)
Concurrent with the approaching awkwardness in Ireland, Florida State’s lawyers are in mediation over a legal dispute against the ACC over grant of rights language. (“Grant of rights” is a penalty that effectively binds schools to their current conferences by forcing programs that leave for new conferences to pay their old ones a considerable chunk of their TV revenue).
Florida State’s lawyers claim it would cost $572 million for the Seminoles to leave the ACC, a move they’re desperate to make because of the ACC’s inability to keep company with the SEC and Big Ten, whose schools are slated to receive significantly more money each year for their share of their leagues’ television revenue.
Meanwhile, Florida State is financing hundreds of millions of dollars in construction debt to keep pace with other national title contenders while also trying to stock a war chest of name, image and likeness funding for players, all while boosting its head coach’s contract. (To add SEC insult to the aforementioned SEC injury, longtime Alabama coach Nick Saban’s recent retirement allowed for Norvell and a group of other coaches to dally with the Crimson Tide just long enough to secure bigger deals at their schools.)
The difference in TV revenue is especially painful in Tallahassee, where Bobby Bowden turned a pre-war women’s college into an overnight football power in the 1980s and ’90s. The warm weather state’s population boom during that period fueled a dynamic rise, but a lack of generational wealth meant Florida State’s endowment couldn’t and still can’t measure up to its aspirational peers.
Those peers include Texas A&M, where former coach Jimbo Fisher alighted after bad-mouthing Florida State’s athletic department for years (despite winning a national title for the Seminoles after the 2013 season). To the Seminoles’ credit, that alleged “lack of support” offloaded a past-his-prime Fisher to College Station for what would become one of the greatest financial embarrassments in modern sports history.
Now, Florida State is exploring a potential investment from private equity firms to close the gap between itself and the schools in the “Big 2” conferences. The insertion of private equity into college sports has raised eyebrows across the industry, most vocally among people such as SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, who spoke out against its potential dangers this summer. (It should be noted that Sankey might take that particular moral stance because his league guzzles most of the TV revenue from ESPN at the expense of other leagues, specifically the ACC.)
But the SEC is, in most measures, a stronger product. So while you can blame the sport’s ceaseless consolidation around television revenue for Florida State’s plight, you should also save room for Bowden: The beloved architect of Florida State’s national relevance famously refused a bid to the SEC in 1992 because he said he believed a path to a championship would be too difficult there. Would the Seminoles boast as many conference and national titles today had they switched over? Probably not, but they’d certainly be borrowing less money right now.
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So while there is, in fact, real, live tackle football slated to start this week, it’s hardly the center of attention in Tallahassee, even in a sport with an eight-month offseason, and even though Florida State is probably a College Football Playoff team. That the Seminoles’ on-field success (the thing they make) is far less compelling than their conference affiliation and financial woes (what we think they’re worth) is what makes them America’s program.
So, too, is the gradual empathy one feels the longer they look at Tallahassee. It would be easy to laugh at their McMillionaire debt issues — if you could rationally explain why schools with fewer (or no) championships find themselves flush with TV money for any reason other than gilded class status.
You could roll your eyes at the accusations of ESPN bias — if not for the very real conflicting interests that define this sport. The value proposition of TV revenue as kingmaker creates a circumstance wherein TV coverage affects the actual financial and on-field circumstances of a school such as Florida State. You don’t need to be covered in garnet and gold body paint to clearly see that while there isn’t a grand conspiracy at play, the Seminoles were at least an inconvenience to the process at hand.
Florida State is swimming in debt toward a murky financial future. It’s suing its partners while trying to attract a better suitor. And it blames a media it’s convinced wouldn’t treat someone with a different name in a different place like this. Florida State is trading on a microwaved legacy with naked ambition, and for this, it is the most American program in the most American sport.
To be clear, none of those circumstances involve actual college football, although it’s relevant to the situation that Florida State will probably be very good on the field in 2024. Coach Mike Norvell is arguably the nation’s best at balancing program development between high school recruiting and cherry picking from the transfer portal. His new quarterback, Oregon State transfer DJ Uiagalelei, is a solid bet to lead the Seminoles to their 17th ACC championship en route to the College Football Playoff.
On Saturday, the Seminoles will face Georgia Tech in Dublin to kick off the season in a showpiece for ESPN. This kind of platforming is ostensibly an honor — and free marketing if nothing else — but Seminoles fans remain convinced ESPN is in cahoots against the well being of their program. Last season, an undefeated Florida State team was rejected by the selection committee of the College Football Playoff, an event ESPN holds exclusive broadcast rights to.
ADVERTISING
Eight months later, ESPN is sending its flagship program, “College GameDay,” to Ireland in part to fete a Seminoles team the network’s programming and pundits spent months denigrating. The gist of the playoff committee’s on-the-record reasoning for excluding Florida State in favor of a one-loss Alabama team was that injuries to the Seminoles’ quarterback at the time of the selection made them a weaker pick. This, understandably, was not received well by the school’s supporters.
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Was Alabama a better team because it won a better conference? Maybe, but after months of watching ESPN mouthpieces such as Paul Finebaum and “GameDay” co-host Kirk Herbstreit openly mocking their circumstances, Florida State fans felt validated in their suspicion. (Those same fans also provided fuel for those hot takes by ceaselessly hectoring ESPN pundits, but today’s muddied editorial landscape of broadcast rights agreements has made it hard to discern whether the pig you shouldn’t wrestle is the crazy message board poster or the glib TV host.)
Concurrent with the approaching awkwardness in Ireland, Florida State’s lawyers are in mediation over a legal dispute against the ACC over grant of rights language. (“Grant of rights” is a penalty that effectively binds schools to their current conferences by forcing programs that leave for new conferences to pay their old ones a considerable chunk of their TV revenue).
Florida State’s lawyers claim it would cost $572 million for the Seminoles to leave the ACC, a move they’re desperate to make because of the ACC’s inability to keep company with the SEC and Big Ten, whose schools are slated to receive significantly more money each year for their share of their leagues’ television revenue.
Meanwhile, Florida State is financing hundreds of millions of dollars in construction debt to keep pace with other national title contenders while also trying to stock a war chest of name, image and likeness funding for players, all while boosting its head coach’s contract. (To add SEC insult to the aforementioned SEC injury, longtime Alabama coach Nick Saban’s recent retirement allowed for Norvell and a group of other coaches to dally with the Crimson Tide just long enough to secure bigger deals at their schools.)
The difference in TV revenue is especially painful in Tallahassee, where Bobby Bowden turned a pre-war women’s college into an overnight football power in the 1980s and ’90s. The warm weather state’s population boom during that period fueled a dynamic rise, but a lack of generational wealth meant Florida State’s endowment couldn’t and still can’t measure up to its aspirational peers.
Those peers include Texas A&M, where former coach Jimbo Fisher alighted after bad-mouthing Florida State’s athletic department for years (despite winning a national title for the Seminoles after the 2013 season). To the Seminoles’ credit, that alleged “lack of support” offloaded a past-his-prime Fisher to College Station for what would become one of the greatest financial embarrassments in modern sports history.
Now, Florida State is exploring a potential investment from private equity firms to close the gap between itself and the schools in the “Big 2” conferences. The insertion of private equity into college sports has raised eyebrows across the industry, most vocally among people such as SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, who spoke out against its potential dangers this summer. (It should be noted that Sankey might take that particular moral stance because his league guzzles most of the TV revenue from ESPN at the expense of other leagues, specifically the ACC.)
But the SEC is, in most measures, a stronger product. So while you can blame the sport’s ceaseless consolidation around television revenue for Florida State’s plight, you should also save room for Bowden: The beloved architect of Florida State’s national relevance famously refused a bid to the SEC in 1992 because he said he believed a path to a championship would be too difficult there. Would the Seminoles boast as many conference and national titles today had they switched over? Probably not, but they’d certainly be borrowing less money right now.
ADVERTISING
So while there is, in fact, real, live tackle football slated to start this week, it’s hardly the center of attention in Tallahassee, even in a sport with an eight-month offseason, and even though Florida State is probably a College Football Playoff team. That the Seminoles’ on-field success (the thing they make) is far less compelling than their conference affiliation and financial woes (what we think they’re worth) is what makes them America’s program.
So, too, is the gradual empathy one feels the longer they look at Tallahassee. It would be easy to laugh at their McMillionaire debt issues — if you could rationally explain why schools with fewer (or no) championships find themselves flush with TV money for any reason other than gilded class status.
You could roll your eyes at the accusations of ESPN bias — if not for the very real conflicting interests that define this sport. The value proposition of TV revenue as kingmaker creates a circumstance wherein TV coverage affects the actual financial and on-field circumstances of a school such as Florida State. You don’t need to be covered in garnet and gold body paint to clearly see that while there isn’t a grand conspiracy at play, the Seminoles were at least an inconvenience to the process at hand.
Florida State is swimming in debt toward a murky financial future. It’s suing its partners while trying to attract a better suitor. And it blames a media it’s convinced wouldn’t treat someone with a different name in a different place like this. Florida State is trading on a microwaved legacy with naked ambition, and for this, it is the most American program in the most American sport.
