Clemson v. ACC proceedings have been delayed. A report from ESPN might explain why.

CLEMSON This week, lawyers for Clemson and the ACC agreed for a third time to push back the deadline for discovery in their ongoing legal fight.

A report from ESPN the network at the center of Clemson and the ACC's broadcast rights dispute might help explain why the legal proceedings in Pickens County have stalled.

According to ESPN college football reporters David M.

Hale and Andrea Adelson, the television network has, as expected, picked up its option for the remainder of its contract with the ACC.

The broadcast deal runs through 2036.

Hale and Adelson report the ACC has now shifted its focus to settling its legal disputes with Clemson and Florida State .

Nothing is "imminent," according to the report, but a settlement could revolve around the ACC's biggest football brands receiving a larger chunk of league revenues.

This could, theoretically, ease the concerns Clemson and FSU have about Big Ten and SEC broadcast payouts outpacing the ACC by tens of millions of dollars.

Some ACC schools are willing to sacrifice dollars in exchange for stability, according to ESPN's report, because they don't want to end up like Oregon State and Washington State, unable to join a power conference after the Pac-12 died.

Per ESPN's report, the ACC is willing to set aside a percentage of television revenues for a "brand" fund, which would be distributed annually to conference institutions that generate the most revenue in football and basketball.

There has also been talk of getting Notre Dame, a non-football ACC member, to play more football games against the league's top teams.

Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua said this month he was open to playing Clemson more regularly.

"When we play a team like Clemson, I think that has become such a great rivalry in such a short amount of time," Bevacqua said, according to The Athletic .

"I would tell you thats the type of game Id love to play every year." The ACC has already acquiesced to some unequal revenue sharing, instituting a "success initiative" to reward schools for postseason achievements.

For instance, ACC schools no longer share College Football Playoff bonuses with the rest of the league.

Clemson made $4 million this season from its CFP game at Texas.

If Clemson and FSU can earn bigger chunks of ACC revenue and maintain a path to CFP dollars through the conference while the ACC buys time in a chaotic era of college athletics that could be an appealing proposition for all sides.

Clemson and FSU have asked the ACC to agree to reduced penalties for exiting the league's grant of rights deal after 2031, according to ESPN.

Currently, the conference is demanding schools pay an exit fee of $140 million, which amounts to three times the ACC's annual operating budget.

Along with a nine-figure exit fee, the ACC has held it would retain Clemson and FSU's broadcast rights even if those schools joined another league because member schools "irrevocably" granted the conference their rights through the length of the ESPN deal.

Unlike FSU, Clemson has been careful to frame its lawsuit against the ACC as an attempt to clarify its rights under the league's broadcast contracts and not a declaration of its intent to leave.

But the university's lawyers have not been shy about mentioning the possibility.

Clemson has accused the ACC of spreading a false narrative about what the grant of rights entails, which resulted in a "chilling effect" on the university's ability to seek another conference and maximize its broadcast revenues.

The university's lawyers have argued Clemson could join another league and the ACC would not own the broadcast rights to games the Tigers play in a new conference only the rights to replays of games Clemson played in the ACC.

In a court proceeding last summer, attorney B.

Rush Smith referenced a "cloud" of uncertainty surrounding the ACC-ESPN agreements.

"We need to remove that cloud so that Clemson can pursue the options it has, the alternatives it has, to maximize the value of a very important part of the university," Smith said on July 12.

Clemson's lawsuit in Pickens County was filed in March , and Judge Perry H.

Gravely ruled against the ACC's motion for dismissal in July.

In September, the conference's attorneys demanded a jury trial.

There has been a significant slowdown in legal filings in Clemson v.

ACC.

The deadline for Clemson to respond to the ACC's "first set of interrogatories" and "requests for production of documents," originally set for Nov.

6, 2024, was pushed to December, then February and now April.

Meanwhile, FSU athletic director Michael Alford claimed in December that his university never said it wanted to leave the ACC, even though an FSU legal filing stated its lawsuit should be taken as a "formal notice of withdrawal" if a court found the ACC's grant of rights were unenforceable.

"Were in the league the last time I looked," Alford told USA Today Sports during the Sports Business Journal Intercollegiate Forum.

"We never said we wanted to leave the league." While FSU has had to walk back its statements, the notion of a settlement between Clemson and the ACC isn't as shocking.

Clemson is a charter member of the conference, which was founded in 1953, and the university was negotiating with the ACC on a nondisclosure agreement as far back as January to see if the two sides could reach a settlement short of suing each other in court.

Those negotiations inevitably didn't go anywhere, and the ACC later used those talks as evidence Clemson misled the conference about its intentions while it prepared to file a lawsuit in Pickens County.

As expected, battling it out in court hasn't been cheap.

Clemson was billed for more than $1 million in legal fees in just the first three months of its lawsuit..

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