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Credit: Inside the MagicAfter years of fighting and millions spent on lawyer fees, it appeared that The Walt Disney Company and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had buried the hatchet. The pair started working together on a new expansion plan for Walt Disney World, and Disney agreed to begin donating to Florida Republicans again.
While that truce seemed nice, it was short-lived. Governor DeSantis and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody are back to fighting with Disney, and this time, their argument is about something more significant in the state than Disney World: college football.
In order to fully understand this latest lawsuit between DeSantis, Disney, and the ACC, you have to have a general understanding of the changing landscape of college football.
As college football became the dominant sport over the last two decades, second only to the NFL, conferences started to forgo their geographical rivalries to bring in more lucrative teams from across the country. This caused teams to flee their conferences with little regard for tradition or geography.
Texas has left the Big 12 for the SEC in the past three years, and USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington left the Pac-12 for the Big 10. These moves are designed to get massive television contracts from ESPN, which The Walt Disney Company owns.
However, while all this was happening and nearly every college football team started receiving massive checks from ESPN, Florida State University was left out in the cold. FSU is currently in the ACC, which has not expanded like other conferences.
The ACC also has a massive buyout clause in its contract. In order to leave the conference, Florida State would have to pay $572 million. Even in the world of college football, that’s a hefty price tag.
So, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody got involved in an attempt to get FSU out of its deal with the conference and into a more lucrative one. Moody filed a public records lawsuit against Disney and ESPN seeking documents related to the network’s television deal with the conference.
The records that Moody received last week reveal very little. Most of the information regarding how much Disney pays the ACC for television rights is redacted, and other “trade secrets” were also redacted.
Florida State sued the conference earlier this year after being excluded from the College Football Playoff despite having an undefeated season. The conference’s poor play was the reason for the snub.
Florida State sued the conference earlier this year after being excluded from the College Football Playoff despite having an undefeated season. The conference’s poor play was the reason for the snub.
The Atlantic Coast Conference countersued the school, seeking to hold them to their contract. The Atlantic Coast Conference went to court to prevent Moody from obtaining the records, saying their ESPN agreement was not “a public record.”
However, now that Gov. DeSantis and Moody are involved and both sides are discussing the next steps in their lawsuit, we can expect another long Disney/DeSantis feud in the near future.