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TxEx84

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by TxEx84

  1. Attended Keeneland over the weekend for Bluegrass Stakes.  Sierra Leone took forever to load into the gate, but what a beast.  Favorite for Kentucky Derby at this point.

     

    And Keeneland -- what a great atmosphere. Packed with 40,000 in attendance and another several thousand tailgating outside. It's cool how the UK kids support racing.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  2. Maybe I'm old (which is true), but seems like Notre Dame would be on top. Any conference would kill to have them. I don't have an Xwitter account, so can't look at the methodology. But something like 1- ND,   2nd tier - Texas/Ohio St,  3rd tier - Bama/Mich, then others.  But obviously, all are extremely valuable.

  3. 57 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

    We found a pair of front-row seats near the 50-yard line at NRG Stadium reselling on SeatGeek for $98,428 each on Wednesday, which included an eye-watering $24,196 in fees alone. The grand total for this primo pair in Section 106, Row A came to $196,854.
     

     

    While you pause to talk the purchase over with your accountant, with those tickets sitting out in your cart, SeatGeek will email you a coupon code for 15% off. But before you get your hopes up thinking you can possibly swing it with a sizable discount of $29,528, a quick check of the fine print on the SeatGeek discount promo will stipulate a maximum savings of $25. That'll bring the all-in price down to $196,829.44. And that's only if you're a first-time purchaser through the ticket vendor.

    When we checked for the tickets again on Thursday morning, they were no longer listed, meaning either some football fan made the splurge of a lifetime or the seller got cold feet. But one section to the right, in Section 105, Row A, we found seats going for $57,447 eachwith fees included. The rub here is that you have to buy six seats, meaning you're looking at $344,678.22 out the door. (Here's hoping your friends don't mind going Dutch.) For perspective — because perspective is sorely needed when the price of anything tips into five- and six-figure territory — seats just a few feet back, in Row B, Section 106, are available for $7,845 each. That includes $1,934 in fees, but is all but theft by comparison.

    Those section 105 seats are now going for $5k each.  A bargain, I tell ya!

    Still doesn't look like the schools have released their seats.  If you look on Ticketmaster, almost no inventory in corner sections. Prices will drop significantly when those hit the market.

  4. 4 hours ago, AP101S said:

    Here's a link to what I have (73 not counting Bussey) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TzoBTIvCXfZIk7Sz3C9txMg0yPvrXyVM/edit#gid=529379820

    RB - Add Jerry Johnson (blue)

    TE - Add Theo Melin Öhrström (probably behind a healthy Green and Platt)

    DT - Add Jadon Scarlett (blue)

    WLB - Add Jurriente Davis

    LCB - Jayvon Thomas is listed twice. Kent Robinson is a PWO.

    RCB - Add Bravion Rogers

    FS - Add Bobby Taylor (blue)

    NB - Josh DeBerry used his Covid year and is out of eligibility (red cross out)

    K - Add Jared Zirkel (Green - KO specialist xfer from Georgia). Add Ethan Moczulski

    P - Add Tyler White

    WLB - Add Jurriente Davis

    FIFY

    • Hook 'Em 1
  5. Spoiler

    Florida State Board of Trustees files legal challenge to ACC’s exit fee, grant of rights


    By Nicole Auerbach and Chris Vannini
    Dec 22, 2023

    After nearly a year of overtures and not-so-veiled threats, Florida State has finally taken legal action against the Atlantic Coast Conference in what could be the first step toward extracting itself from the league it has called home since 1991.

    An exit by FSU could destabilize the college athletics landscape and spark another significant round of realignment, particularly if it paved the way for other disgruntled ACC members to leave the league. But there will be legal challenges to sort through first.


    The Florida State Board of Trustees on Friday filed a complaint for declaratory judgment against the ACC, seeking court guidance to determine whether the ACC’s exit fee and/or grant of rights are legally enforceable against Florida State. The Board states in the filing, a copy of which was obtained by The Athletic, that it needs an answer so it knows whether the school “can be withdrawn from the ACC before the damage to Florida State becomes even more irreversible.”

    Lawyers for the Seminoles estimate that the current cost of paying the ACC’s exit fee in addition to the forfeiture of media rights revenue would cost the school $572 million, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Athletic. They believe that the severity of the penalty to withdraw from the league should be considered “unreasonable restraints of trade” or unenforceable. They also allege in the filing that the ACC materially breached its contracts with Florida State by failing to properly exploit its media rights value, by extending the league’s contract with ESPN in disadvantageous ways without required input from schools and by adding three new members to the ACC (Stanford, Cal and SMU) that do not add value to the conference.

    “The ACC … appeared dedicated to self-preservation and self-perpetuation over the fiscal well-being of its members,” the Board alleges in the filing. “A conference so dedicated cannot endure.”

    The complaint was filed in the circuit court of the Second Judicial Circuit in Leon County, Fla.

    “Today we’ve reached a crossroads in our relationship with the ACC,” Board of Trustees chair Peter Collins said during Friday’s board meeting. “This Board has been left no choice but to challenge the legitimacy of the ACC grant of rights and its severe withdrawal penalties. None of us like being in this position. I know the president and our athletic director don’t like being in this position. I believe we have exhausted all possible remedies within the conference. We must do what’s best for Florida State not only in the short term, but also in the long-term.”

    Florida State vs. the ACC: Understanding the Seminoles' conference unrest

    The Board of Trustees states in the complaint that it cannot vote for the school to withdraw from the conference without knowing the legality of the exit fee and/or the grant of rights, a legally binding document that controls the publicity rights of a conference’s member schools. The ACC’s grant of rights runs through 2036.


    “Through chronic fiduciary mismanagement and bad faith, the ACC has persistently undermined its members’ revenue opportunities including by locking them into a deteriorating media rights agreement that will soon result in a vast annual financial gap between the ACC and other Power Five (soon to be Power Four) conferences,” the Board alleges in the complaint. “Those failures have, by design, coalesced with the ACC’s efforts to effectively deprive ACC members of their fundamental right to withdraw, through the combination of an unconscionable Grant of Rights provision and a prohibitive Withdrawal Penalty that are unparalleled in the history of intercollegiate athletics. …

    “The ACC’s incompetence at the bargaining table unfairly impedes the overall institutional advancement of all its members, including Florida State. By depriving its members of the full media value of their football programs the ACC has undermined its members’ ability to fund other vital sports such as women’s and Olympic sports.”

    Ahead of FSU’s filing, the ACC on Thursday filed its own complaint against the FSU Board of Trustees, this one in Mecklenburg Superior Court in North Carolina. The complaint argues that FSU is not allowed to challenge the grant of rights due to language in the agreement and because FSU signed it and benefitted from it for 10 years. The ACC also argues that jurisdiction for this decision is in North Carolina, where ACC business is handled. FSU’s complaint argues that Florida is the jurisdiction.

    The ACC similarly sued Maryland in 2012 over the size of its exit fee and whether it was around $20 million or around $52 million. Maryland, which was moving to the Big Ten, countersued. The sides eventually settled at $31.3 million two years later through mediation. But that was before the ACC had a grant of rights. This legal fight with FSU revolves around not only an exit fee, but the enforceability of the grant of rights.

    Florida State’s filing alleges that the ACC mishandled and misrepresented its contract extension negotiations with ESPN in 2016, stating that “the ACC verbally represented to its members that ESPN had issued an ultimatum: unless each ACC member executed an extension of the ACC (grant of rights), from 2027 to 2036, a full nine years beyond the then-expiration of ESPN’s Tier I agreement, ESPN would enter into no further media rights agreements with the ACC.”


    The complaint revealed publicly for the first time that the ACC’s 2016 extension with ESPN did not contain any guarantees of payment beyond the initial contract’s expiration on June 30, 2027, and it included a provision that ESPN has “a unilateral option to extend that Agreement” at the previously agreed-upon rate (negotiated in 2012) an additional nine years, through 2036. The filing alleges that ACC members were required to sign and extend the grant of rights through 2036 even though the media rights contract with ESPN was not guaranteed to extend through the same period.

    The launch of the ACC Network in 2019 triggered a requirement that ESPN decide by 2021 whether it would extend the contract from 2027 to 2036. But in August 2021, new ACC commissioner Jim Phillips extended that deadline to February 2025 in a formal amendment that he allegedly signed on his own without approval from two-thirds of his membership, which is required by league bylaws. The complaint concludes there is currently no guarantee of media rights revenue for the conference beyond June 2027.

    Florida State alleges that it was duped into signing the longer-term grant of rights in 2016 because of what it calls a feigned “ESPN Ultimatum,” believing the extension of the grant of rights was not a real precondition because ESPN was not guaranteeing revenue for its duration. The school also states that the language of the 2016 ESPN extension requires the ACC have at least 15 members, but that the members could be interchangeable. That, Florida State believes, is why the league added Stanford, Cal and SMU in August — a move that the complaint calls “self-serving and defensive, as opposed to strategic.”

    The complaint also alleges that the ACC’s exit penalties are egregious and far more severe than peer conferences, and that they were ramped up in response to Maryland’s departure to the Big Ten in 2012 and then increased exponentially in the years that followed to make it essentially impossible for a league member to leave.

    Florida State’s lawyers and media consultants estimate that leaving the ACC now would cost the school $572 million: $429 million for the forfeiture of media rights through 2036 ($33 million for 13 years), $13 million for unreimbursed broadcast fees ($1 million for 13 years); and the exit fee of three times the total operating budget for the ACC, which is approximately $130 million.

    If the exit fee and/or the grant of rights are deemed illegal or unenforceable, the Board also asked the court for Florida State “to be deemed to have issued its formal notice of withdrawal from the ACC under Section 1.4.5 of the ACC Constitution effective August 14, 2023.” That would significantly speed up the school’s actual exit from the conference, as it is required to give official notice of withdrawal before Aug. 15 for the following academic year. Otherwise, FSU could give notice by Aug. 15, 2024 to compete in a different league or as an independent beginning with the 2025-26 academic year.

    “Florida State is a victim of chronic mismanagement by ACC leadership and finds itself unable to effectively evaluate alternatives while the Severe Withdrawal Penalties and the (grant of rights) hang over Florida State’s head,” the filing alleges. “Therefore, those penalties effectively prevent Florida State from realizing its market worth.”


    That language echoes comments made by Florida State leadership over the past year, in prior board meetings but also at ACC meetings and in other public settings. Florida State president Rick McCullough in August cited projections showing that the Seminoles will fall behind their peers in the Big Ten and SEC by as much as $30 million per year by the end of those leagues’ current media deals. Multiple members of the Seminoles’ Board of Trustees openly discussed potentially leaving the ACC altogether because of that in early August.

    “After exploring all options, we are left with only this option as a way to maximize our potential as an athletic department, and it’s best for Florida State University,” said FSU president Rick McCullough during Friday’s board meeting.

    Last year, the Big Ten finalized a new set of broadcast rights agreements worth a total of more than $1 billion per year, which are widely expected to push its annual revenue distributions per school toward $70 million per year; the SEC is poised to raise its revenue payouts to a similar level when Oklahoma and Texas join the league in 2024. Meanwhile, the ACC distributed an average of $39.4 million per school for the 2021-22 school year, a number that has steadily increased but still already lags well behind those of the Big Ten ($58.8 million in ’21-22) and SEC ($49.9 million in ’21-22).

    “We need to do whatever it takes to get there,” McCullough told The Athletic last month. “We’re behind.”

    Florida State athletic director Michael Alford told The Athletic last month that he did not think it made sense for the school to go independent. There are also no assurances from the 16-team SEC or the 18-team Big Ten that invitations are waiting at this point. But officials at Florida State feel hamstrung by the lack of clarity surrounding potential ACC exit fees and exit procedures and are using the complaint to get answers they believe are necessary as they chart their course forward.

    Phillips and Jim Ryan, Chair of the ACC Board of Directors, issued the following statement late Friday morning:

    “Florida State’s decision to file action against the Conference is in direct conflict with their longstanding obligations and is a clear violation of their legal commitments to the other members of the Conference. All ACC members, including Florida State, willingly and knowingly re-signed the current Grant of Rights in 2016, which is wholly enforceable and binding through 2036. Each university has benefited from this agreement, receiving millions of dollars in revenue and neither Florida State nor any other institution, has ever challenged its legitimacy.


    “As a league, we are proud of the successes of our student-athletes and that the ACC has won the most NCAA National Championships over the past two and half years while also achieving the highest graduation success and academic performance rates among all FBS conferences, so it is especially disappointing that FSU would choose to pursue this unprecedented and overreaching approach.

    “We are confident that the Grant of Rights, which has been honored by all other universities who signed similar agreements, will be affirmed by the courts and the Conference’s legal counsel will vigorously enforce the agreement in the best interests of the ACC’s current and incoming members.”

     

    • Hook 'Em 3
  6. 21 minutes ago, PantsTent said:

    Actually the % is based off the "Rank Out of FB STH" column. 

    There are only 16k Foundation members with FB season tickets, and 24k without?  That seems odd.

     

    Especially odd if you look at the basketball graph above it on website.  Says there are 34,162 accounts with points (2240 basketball season ticket holders). But the football chart says 40,581 accounts with points.  Which is it?

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