Florida State University is suing the Atlantic Coast Conference in state court, alleging that FSU should be allowed to withdraw from the collegiate athletic organization after ACC dropped the ball on generating revenues for its members. 

The FSU Board of Trustees filed the legal complaint on Dec. 22 in the Second Judicial Circuit in Leon County. The filing comes in the wake of FSU’s undefeated football team being excluded from the 2023-2024 College Football Playoff in favor of teams in other conferences.

“In the past two decades, in contrast to the ACC, the (Southeastern Conference) and the Big Ten have aggressively and repeatedly negotiated increasingly more lucrative media rights agreements, generating substantial revenues for their members, without locking them into the much longer-term media agreements the ACC negotiated,” the lawsuit states.