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After months of politicking, Florida State took its first official step toward leaving the ACC on Friday.

Spurred into action by a College Football Playoff snub earlier this month, FSU voted to sue the ACC over the grant of rights. The school alleged restraint of trade, breach of contract and failure to perform over what it describes as years of mismanagement that has locked ACC schools in a ‘deteriorating’ media rights agreement while preventing schools from leaving with ‘draconian’ withdrawal penalties.

Translation: Florida State is ready to depart.

But can it? Here are the most pressing questions after Friday’s decision put Florida State into uncharted waters as the first school to challenge a grant of rights agreement in court.

Why is Florida State doing this now?

Florida State has made it clear that missing the College Football Playoff is not the only reason this is happening. The school has not been shy about stating its displeasure with the conference, and it vowed in August that something had to be done about its future sooner rather than later.

Missing the CFP was the last straw. At that point, the board felt the university simply could not wait any longer to take action. Florida State has been working on its legal argument since the summer. Had Florida State made the playoff, the school would have still challenged the grant of rights at some point in 2024. At its board meeting in August, trustee Justin Roth asked for an exit plan to leave the ACC by August 2024.

How much would leaving the ACC cost?

In the lawsuit, Florida State estimates it would cost $572 million to leave the ACC without a legal victory or settlement. It would forfeit $429 million in media rights through 2036, when the ACC contract with ESPN expires; $13 million in unreimbursed broadcast fees; and an exit fee of $130 million (three times the league’s total operating budget).

What is a grant of rights again? And why is it so important?

The grant of rights is a legal document signed by each current member of the ACC that transfers ownership of media rights from the school to the conference. What this means is that the ACC, not Florida State — or any other member school — owns the rights to broadcasts of games. Schools signed this in 2013 as a reaction to the departure of Maryland to the Big Ten, under the rationale that the grant of rights acts as an insurance policy that would prevent anyone from leaving the league during the duration of the agreement, which in this case is through 2036, because a school without TV revenue would have little value to any other conference or enough revenue to stand as an independent.

In other realignment scenarios, schools either waited out the grant of rights (the Pac-12’s agreement ends in summer 2024) or paid a hefty buyout to leave early (Texas and Oklahoma paid $50 million each to the Big 12 to leave that agreement just one year early).

For Florida State — or any other team looking to leave the ACC — the dollars and duration are far more imposing. With 12 seasons remaining on the existing deal after this school year, the Seminoles would need to either wait far longer than they feel is acceptable or pay a nearly impossible buyout to get their media rights back. And this is in addition to the exit fee.

Hence, option No. 3: Go to court and hope to find a legal framework for exiting sooner and at a lower cost.

What are people saying about FSU’s chances of winning?

The short answer is no one knows. One high-level administrator who has worked with legal teams to evaluate various grant of rights agreements said there are potential legal avenues that could negate the contract, but the truth is no school has ever tried to challenge a modern grant of rights in court, and no one is quite certain how a judge might interpret legal arguments.

While the grant of rights and the league’s TV contract are different documents, there is some overlap, and, as one league administrator noted, with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU, the ACC has enough teams to insulate itself against a dissolution of the TV deal even if FSU departs. In a technical sense, that means FSU could leave without costing any other schools TV revenue through 2036.

On the other hand, the loss of FSU would certainly devalue the overall product in the minds of TV partners, and no one would see Florida State for Cal, Stanford and SMU as an even trade.

Moreover, “winning,” in this case, is a nebulous term. Certainly Florida State hopes for a ruling that would entirely negate the grant of rights and the exit fee. Its lawyers argue in the filing that both are “unreasonable restraints of trade in the State of Florida.” They argue that the GOR and withdrawal penalty “operate in a way that prevents Florida State from competing and making the highest and best use of its media rights, and restrains the trade thereof which directly and adversely impacts not just Florida State, but all its student-athletes, coaches, staff and employees connected with its athletic programs.”

But even a favorable ruling would invariably be followed by appeals from the ACC or lawsuits from other member schools. Fighting this to the end figures to be extremely ugly for all parties concerned, so the best outcome might be a negotiated exit fee that would recoup some portion of FSU’s media valuation but not require the Seminoles to pay the whole amount.

Did any other ACC schools think about joining FSU in this suit?

The ACC has been split into various factions since Texas and Oklahoma announced their intended move from the Big 12 to the SEC in summer 2021. A seven-school contingent made waves in spring 2023, effectively pushing the league toward an agreement on imbalanced revenue sharing. Another included a narrower, four-school network of Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina and Miami, seen as the four most valuable commodities should they all hit the market, although UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham was perhaps FSU’s loudest critic in August when the Seminoles made noise about leaving, and Virginia appears to have eclipsed Miami over the past year as a viable realignment candidate. Then there’s the dialogue between FSU and Clemson, which multiple sources have described as “working in lockstep” for the better part of the past two years as they considered their options.

Still, FSU’s decision was made alone.

Clemson — and perhaps others — could follow Florida State’s lead, but for the time being, those schools are content to let the Seminoles test the uncertain waters and take the initial heat for the decision.

Ultimately, only a handful of ACC teams are likely to have greener pastures elsewhere, but learning just how bulletproof the grant of rights is would be of interest to all 15 existing members. Florida State would welcome other league schools to join and fight the GOR together.

What would happen to the ACC if Florida State leaves?

It’s impossible to know the answer without knowing how many other schools might try to follow FSU’s lead, but the league watched the demise of the Pac-12 this past summer with enough wariness that 12 school presidents voted to add Stanford, Cal and SMU to the league to help shore up its numbers to protect its TV contract.

Aside from Clemson, North Carolina and perhaps one or two others, there’s little incentive for any other ACC schools to leave in the short term. For one thing, there’s not another landing spot that would provide TV revenue (not to mention a TV network) that would match what the league currently has — with or without FSU. Moreover, schools that stick it out would be able to get their cut of the exit fees and media rights buyout from any programs that depart — an amount that could serve as a nice golden parachute long term.

And, as one ACC athletic director told ESPN, the future of the top level of college football is so uncertain at the moment that it’s entirely possible the entire system will get upended in the next three to five years anyway, so waiting out the coming storm long enough to better project what constitutes a safe harbor might be the wisest course of action.

There is one caveat to all of this. The lawsuit claims that the ACC’s current deal with ESPN contains a unilateral option for the TV network in 2027 that must be exercised by February 2025 to extend the deal to 2036. So, if that were the case, ESPN could walk away from the deal in 14 months. Although the grant of rights is a separate document from the television contract, the two are tied together. If ESPN walks away, does that mean the grant of rights is no longer valid because there is no longer a multimedia rights deal? Or does the grant of rights carry on through 2036 no matter what? That remains unclear.

What comes next?

Under the Florida rules of civil procedure, the ACC has 20 days to file a response, which could be a motion to dismiss. Because of the holidays, the league could ask for an extension of 30 days. There are several potential outcomes to watch for: a summary judgment motion, in which a judge decides the outcome of the contract; mediation in which the ACC and Florida State work out their differences; a negotiated settlement; or a jury trial, which would happen if both sides continue to litigate with no end in sight. What remains unknown right now is what approach the ACC will take to fight this in court. The league could ask for a judge to dismiss the case with one simple argument: Florida State willingly signed the grant of rights twice: in 2013, and then again in 2016 when the league’s long-term deal with ESPN was announced.

Those briefed on the discussions are not expecting this to be resolved quickly.

What is a timeline for an ultimate resolution here?

As one ACC AD told ESPN, realignment has ruined the past two summers, and they already told their staff not to let this latest unrest unravel any holiday plans. The takeaway: This is just the start of a very, very long process.

The majority of administrators who spoke with ESPN said they expected it would be at least two to three years before any final resolution, and given the dollar figures at stake and the existential threat FSU’s departure presents to the league, neither side has much incentive to roll over without a serious fight.

Where could Florida State ultimately end up?

To be clear, Florida State does not have an invitation to join another conference right now. Before being publicly available, the grant of rights must be resolved. But let’s play this out if Florida State becomes a free agent.

The ideal conference might be the Big Ten — where it would give that league its first foothold in Florida, and allow the conference to challenge the SEC by making inroads south. Florida State president Richard McCullough arrived in 2021 from Harvard and has been working hard for admission to the Association of American Universities, which is valued by the Big Ten. A majority of the league’s schools are AAU members.

Florida State would not be choosy, though, and would certainly welcome an invite to the SEC, which would needle in-state rival Florida.

But there is one wild-card scenario out there. If a judge rules in favor of Florida State, the school would be forced to withdraw from the ACC and leave the league at the end of that athletic year. If that happens before the SEC or Big Ten is ready to expand, the Big 12 would be the only option remaining.

It is important to note here that the entire reason the ACC pushed for its schools to sign a grant of rights is because Florida State flirted with leaving the league in 2012 for … the Big 12.

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Ohtani delivers first walk-off hit as a Dodger

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Ohtani delivers first walk-off hit as a Dodger

LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani delivered his second major league walk-off hit, a two-out single in the 10th inning that sent the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 3-2 victory over the Cincinnati Reds on Sunday.

Andy Pages hit an early two-run homer for the Dodgers, who have won 20 of 26 after taking three of four from Cincinnati.

Pinch-hitter Will Smith drew a one-out walk in the 10th from Alexis Diaz (1-3), who got Mookie Betts to fly out before Ohtani stroked a single to right, scoring Jason Heyward. Ohtani’s latest feat set off a loud celebration for another huge weekend crowd at Dodger Stadium.

His only other walk-off hit in Major League Baseball was an 11th-inning single for the Los Angeles Angels in a 6-5 win over Houston on Sept. 4, 2020.

It was Ohtani’s 21st multi-hit game this season, the most in MLB. He is hitting .393 this month, the third-highest batting average in MLB among hitters with at least 20 at-bats in May (Kevin Pillar .447, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. .407).

Stuart Fairchild had two hits for the Reds, who have lost 15 of 18. Cincinnati also has lost seven consecutive series.

Anthony Banda (1-0) got three straight outs in the 10th in his debut with the Dodgers, who acquired the reliever from Cleveland on Friday. Banda’s win was his first since May 28, 2022, with Pittsburgh. He has pitched for the Blue Jays, Yankees, Nationals and Dodgers — and played in Cleveland’s minor league system — since leaving the Pirates less than two years ago.

Cincinnati reliever Emilio Pagan left abruptly with two outs in the ninth and a 2-1 count on Heyward. Pagan recorded two outs before throwing three straight fastballs to Heyward and then departing with a possible shoulder injury.

Diaz struck out Heyward to force extra innings.

Hunter Greene struck out eight while pitching four-hit ball into the seventh inning for Cincinnati in his second career start in his hometown. The hard-throwing right-hander got youth coaching at Compton’s Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy and played high school ball in Sherman Oaks before the Reds made him the second overall pick in 2017.

Landon Knack yielded one run on three hits over the first 4⅔ innings for the Dodgers in his fourth major league appearance. Knack made three starts in April, and he got recalled from Triple-A Oklahoma City for this spot start apparently so the Dodgers could give a full week of rest to Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

Freddie Freeman singled in the fourth before Pages put a poor slider into the short porch down the left-field line for the fifth homer of his rookie season.

Cincinnati had been shut out for 16 consecutive innings at Chavez Ravine before it scored on back-to-back doubles to left in the fifth by Fairchild and Santiago Espinal, whose catchable drive fooled Teoscar Hernandez.

Cincinnati tied it in the seventh when pinch-hitter Spencer Steer — a Long Beach native in an 0-for-16 slump — drew a bases-loaded walk on nine pitches from Alex Vesia, who escaped the jam.

ESPN Stats & Information and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Rangers’ Garcia scratched with forearm soreness

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Rangers' Garcia scratched with forearm soreness

ARLINGTON, Texas — Rangers slugger Adolis Garcia was scratched from the starting lineup Sunday and got an MRI on his right forearm, a day after a collision in the outfield with second baseman Marcus Semien while both All-Star players went after a popup.

Manager Bruce Bochy said the plan had been for García, their primary right fielder, to be the designated hitter in the series finale against the Los Angeles Angels.

“The right forearm area took a pretty good shot there from Marcus, so he’ll get checked out,” Bochy said before the game. “We’ll have an MRI done, see where we’re at. My guess is, I’m hoping anyway, after the day off, he’ll be good to go.”

Bochy, without elaborating, said after their 4-1 loss that the MRI looked good.

The Rangers have a day off Monday before a three-game series at Philadelphia.

Semien was running out and García was coming in on Taylor Ward‘s popup to shallow right field in the sixth inning. Semien collided into García who had pulled up and gone down to a knee to get the ball after it dropped to the ground. Semien took a hard tumble, though both players stayed in and finished the Rangers’ 3-2 win in 13 innings.

García, the American League Championship Series MVP last year, hit his 11th homer of the season in the bottom of the sixth inning to tie the game at 1-1. He is hitting .251 and his 35 RBIs ranked fourth in the American League this season.

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‘This fan base is going to fall in love with him’: How Luis Arráez is following in Tony Gwynn’s footsteps

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'This fan base is going to fall in love with him': How Luis Arráez is following in Tony Gwynn's footsteps

Comparisons to Tony Gwynn began to follow Luis Arráez when he first established himself in the big leagues, growing more prevalent as the hits piled up and the batting titles followed. Arráez wasn’t as prolific, but his skills and the way he utilized them — consistently spraying baseballs to unoccupied spaces all over the field, barreling pitches regardless of how or where they were thrown — made links to one of history’s most gifted hitters seem inevitable.

Tony Gwynn Jr., the late Hall of Famer’s son, often heard them and largely understood them. But it wasn’t until the night of May 4, while watching Arráez compile four hits in his debut with the same San Diego Padres team his father starred for, that he actually felt them.

“I honestly had goosebumps watching him put together at-bats,” said Gwynn Jr., a retired major league outfielder who serves as an analyst for the Padres’ radio broadcasts. “It took me back to watching film with my dad as he was basically doing the same thing.”

Gwynn was universally celebrated throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but Arráez stands as a polarizing figure in the slug-obsessed, launch-angle-consumed era in which he plays. Some, like the Miami Marlins team that traded him away earlier this month, see a one-dimensional player who doesn’t provide enough speed, power or defensive acumen to build around. Others, like the Padres, who used four prospects to acquire him at a time when trades rarely happen, see the type of offensive mastery that more than makes up for it.

What’s inarguable is that Arráez is the ultimate outlier.

Case in point: The publicly available bat-speed metrics recently unveiled by Statcast feature a graph that places hitters based on their relationship between average bat speed (X-axis) and squared-up rate (Y-axis). All alone on the top left corner, far removed from the other 217 qualified hitters, is Arráez. He has the slowest swing in the sport but also its most efficient, theoretically, because he meets pitches with the sweet spot of his bat more often than anybody else.

Arráez has only 24 home runs in 2,165 career at-bats. But his .324 batting average since his 2019 debut leads the majors, 10 points higher than that of Freddie Freeman, the runner-up. He walks at a below-average clip, but his major league-leading 7.5% strikeout rate is about a third of the MLB average during that stretch, cartoonish in the most strikeout-prone era in baseball history.

He is elite even when he chases: The major league average on pitches outside the rulebook strike zone since the start of the 2023 season is .162. Arráez’s: .297.

“Now with the analytics they focus on home runs, they focus on guys hitting the ball hard but hitting .200,” Arráez said in Spanish. “But in my mind, and with all the work that I do, I stay focused on just doing my job — not try to do too much or try to do what they’re telling me to do. Analysts say my exit velocity is [among] the lowest in the big leagues. Amen. Let them keep saying that. As long as I have my health, I keep doing things to help my team, I’m going to be fine.”

Arráez became the first player to win a batting title in the American and National leagues in consecutive seasons last year. But trade rumors surrounded him from the onset of 2024, his second-to-last season before free agency. As a 27-year-old two-time All-Star with a .324 career batting average, a sterling reputation and a stated desire to remain in South Florida, he was a player the directionless Marlins franchise could build around. But a new front office considered him expendable. A 9-24 start to the season created an opening. And on May 3, five minutes before the first pitch was thrown in Oakland, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker called Arráez into his office.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Arráez said, “I wasn’t ready to be traded.”

Schumaker told Arráez he’d have to remove him from the lineup because a deal with the Padres was close. He gave him the option of returning to the clubhouse or going into the dugout for one final moment with his teammates. Arráez stayed until the fifth inning, retreated to his hotel room, waited on a call from Padres officials and hopped on a flight at noon the following day to meet his new team.

Arráez didn’t have enough clothes for the additional six days of the Padres’ road trip. He wore his Marlins-colored cleats through stops in Phoenix and Chicago and compiled eight hits in 20 at-bats during that stretch. After the team got back to San Diego, he used the May 9 off day to search for an apartment and spend time with his mom, wife and three daughters, who flew in for a weekend visit, then delivered a walk-off single against the rival Los Angeles Dodgers in his home debut the following night. He’s still living out of a hotel room crammed with unopened boxes, but he already feels wanted. Embraced, even.

“They’ve welcomed me here with open arms,” Arráez said. “I feel as if I’ve been here since spring training.”

Arráez was a 4-year-old in Venezuela when Gwynn played the final season of his 20-year career in 2001. When Gwynn died in 2014, Arráez was still a teenager on the Minnesota Twins‘ Dominican Summer League team. Hearing comparisons to Gwynn made him curious enough to find old clips of a player who was mostly foreign to him. He began to study his approach to hitting, marveling specifically at Gwynn’s ability to let pitches travel deep into the strike zone before driving them to the opposite field.

Conversations with one of Gwynn’s most important mentors, Twins icon and gifted batsman Rod Carew, brought Arráez more insight. Now similar conversations are taking place with Gwynn’s only son. When the Padres return from their seven-game road trip through Atlanta and Cincinnati, Arráez plans to visit the Gwynn statue that sits just outside of Petco Park. He isn’t necessarily leaning into the comparisons, but he isn’t running from them, either.

“It’s such a great experience when fans embrace you with open arms and tell you that I’m a mini Tony Gwynn, and that I have a lot of traits that remind them of him,” Arráez said. “It’s nice to hear people say things like that.”

Perhaps the quality Gwynn and Arráez share most is self-awareness. “Know thyself” is a line Gwynn Jr. heard his father say repeatedly growing up, one that translated directly to how he approached his profession: He knew his strengths, worked relentlessly to maximize them and never tried to emulate others. Arráez’s new teammates already see the same in him.

“It’s not like he goes up there and just does it,” Padres third baseman Manny Machado said. “He puts a lot of work in the cage, before games, even before BP and stuff like that. He knows his strength, and he works on it.”

Baseball’s evolution has made it harder than ever for someone like Arráez to exist. Pitchers have never thrown harder, data has never been more prevalent, batting averages have hardly ever been lower. But Padres manager Mike Shildt is adamant that Arráez shouldn’t be an anomaly.

He recalled an old San Diego Union-Tribune article that re-ran May 9, on what would have been Gwynn’s 64th birthday. It detailed the amount of time Gwynn spent working on hitting, and it validated something Shildt had long believed: That more players could hit .300, even today, if they worked on the craft of doing so as diligently and as pointedly as Gwynn did. As Arráez does.

“When you have an ability to hit a ball to all the different areas, you’re going to hit,” Shildt said. “And big picture, our industry hasn’t taught that anymore. It’s not valued anymore. It’s not monetized anymore. You can’t quantify this, but it’s a shame how many amateur and lower-level professional players have been excluded from continuing to play because they don’t meet a measurable. They don’t meet an exit velocity or bat speed or launch angle, or all of those things that this game is now basically recruiting and monetizing blindly. They’re just getting hits. And somehow that became out of vogue in our industry in general.”

But those are now someone else’s problems. The Padres will gladly take Arráez, all he his and all he isn’t, and slot him ahead of Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Xander Bogaerts in hopes of riding his singular bat to the playoffs.

Arráez is still six batting titles away from catching Gwynn. He isn’t anywhere near as good a defender or as lethal a baserunner as Gwynn was early in his career, and he needs another decade-plus of similar production — heightened production, actually, given the .345 batting average Gwynn boasted between his ages 27 and 37 seasons — to even approach him as a hitter. But Arráez’s style is the closest we’ve got.

And if there’s one place that can appreciate it, it’s his new one.

“This fan base is going to fall in love with him,” Gwynn Jr. said. “It’s how a lot of them grew up watching baseball.”

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