FSU's money matters

It's one thing when media and fans take a fact or a number and exaggerate its importance.

But at Florida State, it seems the administrators themselves join in the fun too.

Remember when people in Tallahassee were going nuts about the $2.4 million budget shortfall announced by athletics director Randy Spetman?

"Florida State needs to decide if we're going to be in big-time athletics or not," former Board of Trustees chair Jim Smith told the Democrat. "I think we've got the support to be in big-time athletics. I think we're structured wrong.

"Frankly, I hope this is a wake-up call. We have some very, very good coaches here. When they wake up and realize that they have less resources than these schools that are raising (their budgets) 15-20 percent a year, then they will be gone. You can't blame them for that."

Well, so much for that wake-up call. Turns out Florida State is in the black now thanks to more money than anticipated from the ACC.

During an address made Friday morning to the board of trustees at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Spetman acknowledged that thanks to money from the ACC, FSU's athletics department is no longer facing a $2.4 million shortfall on its next fiscal budget.

Also disappeared with the ACC's benevolent snap of a finger, is the $500,000 budgetary deficit from fiscal year 2011-12 that had been staring at the Seminoles in recent weeks.

"The way the conference distributes money every year, they were very conservative; which I was very thankful for," Spetman said.

Instead of receiving approximately $14 million total this year from the ACC as part of a conference distribution pool, FSU has received nearly $16 million, Spetman said. That $16 million was the result of an additional $1.6 million paid from the ACC on June 1 that the university received that it hadn't been expecting.

The June 1 check totaled $6,997,398.85, a school official told the Orlando Sentinel.

On its most recent athletics budget, announced during an athletics board meeting in Tallahassee on May 2, Spetman's office expected receiving just $14.1 million for the year from the conference. In other words, the university was only looking for approximately $5.4 million on that June 1 check.

"They give us what they project is their budget for conference distribution based on television, based on any media rights they have in championship games, the NCAA basketball tournament, the conference football championship game, the NCAA distribution," Spetman said. "This conference distributes money evenly. There's nobody that gets more money for TV appearances or otherwise.

"It's a great way to run a conference."

So now everything seems hunky dory in Seminole land, enough that the president is saying all this Big 12 hysteria -- fueled in part by FSU's apparent budget shortfalls -- has been greatly exaggerated.

Some very interesting details from Eric Barron's talking points, revealed by our pals at Warchant.com.

He's calling for stronger non-conference scheduling, something the new nine-game ACC schedule would impair. He's saying that maybe the ACC should realign to divisions that better incorporate geography.

Just a guess from the outside looking in, but maybe Florida State (and perhaps Clemson as well) are using some of the leverage that comes from being football-centric schools in a football-centric athletics universe?

A few Monday links:

-- More craziness coming from the academic scandal in Chapel Hill. Not long ago we were told by Holden Thorp that there was nothing more to see here, we've thoroughly investigated this stuff, bla bla bla. Now some dogged reporting from the News & Observer reveals there's much more to the story.

-- In Atlanta, three things you didn't know about The Chessmaster.

-- At Auburn, a Q&A with Gene Chizik. Still hard to believe that this time last year Auburn had one of the sexiest offenses in college football and now the man who called the shots in that offense, Gus Malzahn, is gone.

Here's some insight from Chizik as to what Auburn will look like in 2012:

"To me, the biggest change is we are going to be under center more and we are going to huddle more. Offensively, the last three years we still ran essentially the same running plays we are running now. There are only so many running plays out there you can invent."

"You can dress them up any way you want, do them out of different formations, move people around and do it on the move and all those things. At the end of the day, it is essentially the same running game. Are there some different flavors to it? Definitely. As a whole, I think it's probably perceived a lot different than it really is in terms of wholesale change."

-- And, of course, the biggest news out of Auburn right now is terrible news. Thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved.

LW