Clemson and Florida State approve settlement with ACC over media rights contract

The cost of leaving the ACC is set to drop considerably in the coming years.

As part of the agreement to settle litigation between Clemson and Florida State and the conference, ACC teams will have the opportunity to leave the conference in 2031 for as little as $75 million according to ESPN. That figure comes as the exit fee in 2026 would be $165 in the 2026 fiscal year. From there, the exit fees in the conference will decline by $18 million a year through 2031.

And perhaps most importantly for any school looking to make a break from the ACC, a university will retain its future media rights when leaving the conference. The media rights and the exit fees for leaving the ACC were a main point of contention at Clemson and FSU.

Both Clemson and Florida State's boards of trustees approved the settlement Tuesday morning.

The ACC’s media rights deal with ESPN goes through the 2036 season. Schools were locked into that agreement as FSU contended that it could cost upwards of $700 million to leave the conference and wouldn’t have its own media rights until after 2036. The length of that deal was once seen as a stabilizing force for the conference; however, the ACC’s annual payments to its member schools are dwarfed by the revenue that the Big Ten and SEC pay to its schools.

Clemson also believes that it could make more than $120 million in additional revenue over the next six years thanks to a new payout structure in the conference that rewards on-field success as well as television viewership. Clemson and Florida State have been two of the most-watched football teams in the conference as the Tigers have been the only team from the conference to make the four-team College Football Playoff multiple times.

Though ACC schools now have a path forward to leaving the conference at the end of the decade, it’s still unclear where they would go. The Big Ten and SEC haven’t shown an inclination to add more teams, and it’s hard to see ESPN and Fox upping their TV deals with the conferences if they expand. Without more media revenue, expanded conferences would have to spread their current payouts to more schools. And existing members aren’t too fond of pay cuts.

But six years is also a long time in our current era of college athletics. Given how quickly the college sports landscape has changed in recent years, there’s no guarantee the current conference structure will be in place in the 2030s.