Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody on Thursday filed a lawsuit against the Atlantic Coast Conference demanding the conference produce the ESPN-ACC television contract as part of a public records request. If successful, the lawsuit could indirectly make public the broadcast agreements other conferences have made with major networks as well.
Moody in January submitted a public records request for the contract, which remains at ACC headquarters, where league members are only allowed to view it in-person and cannot make copies. The ACC denied the request that same month.
“The ACC is asking a state entity — Florida State University — to potentially pay and lose more than a half a billion dollars but is refusing to produce the documents related to that outrageous price tag,” Moody said in a statement. “We sent a public records request to the ACC in January, but they failed to fully comply. We are taking legal action against the ACC for wrongfully withholding these important public records.”
Moody’s lawsuit, filed in Leon County, Fla., is the third legal challenge surrounding Florida State’s attempt to get out of the ACC’s grant of rights contract, alongside FSU’s case against the ACC in Florida and the ACC’s case against FSU in North Carolina. Earlier this month, a North Carolina business court judge allowed the ACC to file parts of the TV contract under seal and out of public record.
In its denial of Moody’s public records request on Jan. 19, the ACC cited trade secrets and argued that the contract was between the ACC and ESPN and not a public entity like FSU, which is only a member of the conference.
“These agreements contain commercially sensitive and proprietary information which, if publicly disclosed, would irreparably harm the Conference’s and ESPN’s ability to negotiate future rights agreements,” ACC general counsel Pearlynn Houck wrote in January. “The Conference has an obligation to ESPN, as a party to the agreements, to protect its fundamental business interests as reflected in the agreements. Courts across the country have protected these types of agreements, including the present agreements between the Conference and ESPN, in a variety of lawsuits.
“These agreements further require that ESPN and the Conference take all steps to preserve and protect the confidentiality of these agreements and bar their disclosure to third parties. The Conference has taken appropriate measures to protect the confidentiality of these agreements by limiting access to them and maintaining them only at its Headquarters, which is common practice in the industry for media agreements executed by athletic conferences.”
This case won’t only impact Florida State and the ACC. If Moody’s lawsuit is successful, other television deals involving conferences with public universities in Florida could also become public records, Kevin Paule, an attorney for Hill Ward Henderson in Florida told The Athletic. That includes the SEC (Florida), Big 12 (UCF), American Athletic Conference (USF, FAU), Conference USA (Florida International) and others. It could also open up conference TV contracts in other states, depending on their public records laws.
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