TALLAHASSEE — In the latest move in a fierce legal battle, the Atlantic Coast Conference has appealed a Leon County circuit judge’s refusal to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Florida State University against the ACC over issues such as sports media rights.
The ACC is challenging at the 1st District Court of Appeal an Aug. 13 order by Circuit Judge John Cooper denying a conference motion to dismiss the case. In seeking dismissal, the ACC contended, in part, that Cooper didn’t have “jurisdiction” over the university’s claims against the North Carolina-based conference.
A notice of appeal, filed last week, does not detail arguments the ACC will make at the Tallahassee-based appeals court.
But in an accompanying motion for a stay of the lawsuit while the appeal plays out, conference attorneys pointed to a separate case that the ACC filed against Florida State in North Carolina over similar issues.
The motion argued that disputes about the media-rights agreements should be resolved in North Carolina and that the ACC is not subject to what is known as a “long-arm” law that would make it subject to Florida courts.
“Indeed, in its 70-plus-year existence, the ACC always has operated under North Carolina law, and the North Carolina contracts that FSU asks this court (Cooper) to construe have existed for years,” the motion for a stay said. “The ACC thus would have no reason to anticipate that if questions ever arose about the proper construction of those contracts, then Florida’s courts — not North Carolina’s courts — would provide the answers.”
In his Aug. 13 order, however, Cooper wrote that FSU “sufficiently alleged several different bases of long-arm jurisdiction.” He said the conference exercises “home-game media rights” for FSU and the University of Miami and uses those media rights for programming on the ACC Network and licensing to the ESPN sports network.
“I find … that the ACC operates and conducts a significant business or business venture with both FSU and Miami in Florida regarding home game media rights and, incidentally, with the selling of related merchandise,” Cooper wrote. “Put otherwise, the ACC entered into a sports media business in Florida centered on FSU and Miami home games.”
But in the motion for a stay last week, the conference’s attorneys argued that “games played in Florida are not the basis for the ACC’s revenue generated from the revenue rights that FSU granted” to the conference in agreements.
“Rather, FSU transferred all its media rights to the ACC,” the conference’s attorneys, who include former Florida Supreme Court Justice Alan Lawson, wrote. “The ACC then bundled those rights with those of its other members and sold them to ESPN. This activity — i.e., the bundling, negotiation and execution of these agreements with ESPN — occurred exclusively at the conference’s headquarters in North Carolina, not Florida.”
The notice of appeal was filed after a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal heard arguments last week in a separate appeal filed by the ACC in June. That appeal is aimed at putting the Leon County lawsuit on hold while the lawsuit that the ACC filed in North Carolina is resolved.
The legal battle is being closely watched in college sports and comes amid major restructuring of conferences. FSU, which is widely believed to be seeking to leave the ACC to move to a more-lucrative conference, essentially contends the ACC has shortchanged its members through television contracts and that the school would face exorbitant financial penalties if it leaves.
FSU filed its lawsuit Dec. 22 in Leon County, a day after the conference filed its case in Mecklenburg County, N.C.
Florida State sought dismissal of the North Carolina lawsuit, but Louis Bledsoe, chief business court judge in Mecklenburg County, rejected the request in April. FSU appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, where the issue remains pending, according to the motion for a stay filed last week in the Leon County case.