Florida State and Clemson could be on the path to settling their lawsuits against the ACC as part of a revised revenue-sharing system under the conference’s media-rights deal with ESPN.

On Thursday afternoon, ESPN and the ACC announced the network has agreed to pick up the option on its contract to continue as the conference’s sole broadcast partner through 2036. If the option had been declined, the ESPN-ACC deal would have expired in 2027. There was a Feb. 1 deadline.

When the ACC added Cal, Stanford, and SMU last year, ESPN increased its rights fee which makes up the majority of the revenue the conference annually distributes to its members. Notably, Cal and Stanford agreed to take reduced payments, which amount to $30 million each year for other schools, and SMU is not receiving any media money.

The key part of the new agreement could be that a percentage of the ACC’s TV revenue will be included in a “brand” fund, according to multiple reports, including ESPN, which would then be distributed to schools that annually generate the most revenue for the conference in football and men’s and women’s basketball. Florida State and Clemson would be expected to drop their lawsuits if the agreement is finalized.

How We Got Here

In December 2023, Florida State and the ACC sued and countersued each other to determine whether the Seminoles could leave the conference without paying an almost $600 million exit fee.

In March 2024, Clemson filed a lawsuit against the ACC to ascertain whether the conference’s Grant of Rights (which binds schools to a conference for the lifespan of its media contract) was legally enforceable. The ACC countersued Clemson shortly afterward.

That litigation has remained unresolved as conference realignment has hit the nation and the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams.

One of the foremost U.S. companies for TV distribution and internet connectivity is finding content itself to be an increasingly critical pathway—with sports standing at the heart of that growing shift.

Comcast, the No. 2 pay-TV provider and major entity for broadband access, reported a company record Thursday for quarterly revenue, with its fourth-quarter haul of $31.9 million beating the comparable total from 2023 by 2.1%, as well as analyst projections. Net income, meanwhile, soared by nearly 47% to $4.8 million in the quarter.

Amid the superlatives, though, the totals revealed a major pivot point for the NBC Sports parent company. Comcast lost another 311,000 cable-TV subscribers in the quarter, leaving a new total of 12.5 million, and broadband subscriptions similarly fell by 139,000 to 31.8 million. 

The company, however, saw meaningful growth in several parts of its content business, including a 28% revenue surge with its Peacock streaming service to $1.3 billion, as well as improved results from its movie studio and theme park operations, plus its sports networks. 

Peacock has 36 million subscribers, flat from Comcast’s third-quarter results. The pathway to profitability for the service, however, continues to improve as losses there fell to $372 million, less than half the comparable total for the prior-year period and down from a $436 million loss in the third quarter. There was also no major churn following the subscriber boosts seen during and immediately after the Paris Olympics. 

Despite those gains, though, investors were still rather displeased with the cable and broadband subscriber losses, and sent Comcast stock down 11% Thursday to a 52-week low of $33.25 per share. 

Spin-Off Talk

Another notable statistic emerging Thursday regarding Peacock was that 98% of the viewing on the service involving NBCUniversal channels is from content not on cable channels it plans to spin off by the end of this year, and instead is dominated by NBC’s broadcast channel and Bravo. To that end, Comcast executives said the percentage was a further testament to the evolved corporate strategy.

“We’re not really running a Peacock-only strategy. We’re running a broadcast-plus-streaming strategy, and looking to optimize that over the years ahead,” said Comcast president Mike Cavanagh. 

Of course, standing at the top of that more focused media model is sports, particularly the NFL and Olympics. In the meantime, NBCUniversal outlets that will be part of the spinoff, like the Golf Channel, are already preparing for a newly separated reality.

“We’re definitely going to operate as two different companies, for sure, independent of one another,” NBC Sports EVP of golf Tom Knapp tells Front Office Sports. “We will continue to be who we need to be, and have synergies with NBC, but clearly, we will be an independent business.”

NBA Impact

Cavanagh, meanwhile, acknowledged the arrival of NBA rights to NBC beginning this fall, costing roughly $2.5 billion annually, may ultimately result in price increases at Peacock or the establishment of a higher subscription tier. Any such decisions, however, will not arrive until at least 2026.

“I would give us the full first season of NBA, into the second season, before we sort of normalize our businesses to handle the higher expense there,” he said.

The Utah Hockey Club is abandoning efforts to rename the franchise permanently to the Yeti or Yetis, instead unveiling three other candidates in a major twist in the long-running and high-profile branding effort. 

Just days after the NHL franchise ran into fierce opposition from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to use the Yeti name that had been widely seen as a likely choice, it acknowledged it was unable to strike a “coexistence agreement” with the popular brand of drinkware, bags, and coolers. That, in turn, helped imperil any efforts by the team to counter the provisional trademark rejection from the USPTO.

“The difference with Yeti was the trademarks they have on clothing and licensed products,” Mark Maughan, executive for Smith Entertainment Group, which owns the team, tells Front Office Sports. That same licensing is core to any pro sports team. “It had everything to do with the trademark that they have on clothing and licensed products.”

As a result, the team will now invite fans to vote on three finalist possibilities: the preexisting options of keeping the Utah Hockey Club name or the Mammoth, and a new option of Wasatch—referencing the local mountain range and essentially acting as a replacement choice for Yeti.

The fan vote will be held among attending fans at the Delta Center over the next four home games, using tablets stationed around the arena, with a total potential vote count of more than 50,000. The club still intends to have the new name and logo finalized in advance of the 2025–2026 NHL season. Maughan predicted an end to the trademark issues surrounding the process and said the team is on “very solid ground” to complete the process with any of the three finalists.

“The entire process has been an intentional narrowing down,” Maughan says. 

Tough Road

Both Maughan and external branding experts, however, acknowledged the difficulty of any new trademarking effort. There have now been so many different types of business ventures, in and out of sports, involving established, existing language that creating a new brand often involves also forming a new word.

“Us trademark lawyers have a nerdy little joke: ‘Have we run out of names to trademark?’” Zakari Kurtz, founder of Sneaker Law Firm PLLC, tells FOS. “It’s comical because you can trademark just about anything, and there aren’t many names left available.”