Dave Hyde: After Florida State’s snub bowl comes its legal game that will shake college football

DANIA BEACH — The normal questions came in the normal way. Everyone played their role. Reporters. Bowl officials. And especially Florida State’s third-string quarterback and offensive coordinator, who will work the Orange Bowl without Seminoles players who produced 94.4 percent of their yards this undefeated season.

“All we got is all we need,’’ said the freshman quarterback, Brock Glenn, delivering the predictable motto of this remaining team.

“They all think they should have been playing all along,’’ offensive coordinator Alex Atkins said of the replacements.

FSU’s starting backfield? Gone. Its top receivers? Gone, too. It’s secondary? One starter left. Mighty Georgia’s roster is intact. Florida State lost 13 starters to the transfer porthole or NFL draft process, collateral damage to the broad outrage and general derision of the College Football Playoffs snubbing its 13-0 team.

Players are the real assets of college football, a reality formed in recent years with players getting paid above the table. Coaches grumble about a capitalist world. Many fans, too. And a school like Florida State plays an empty roster while preparing for a more serious game in court.

That’s its demand to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference. This move will bleed into everything and everyone in college sports, starting with the Miami team that plays a paperweight bowl game Thursday without its quarterback or several top players, too.

There’s a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo in FSU’s attempt to leave the conference. Fiduciary duties. Grant of Rights. FSU’s Board of Trustees sued the ACC. The ACC sued back. But, come on, you know how this movie ends. You’ve seen it play out in other conferences.

Florida State pulled the Jenga piece that eventually will collapse the ACC. It might take a bit. It certainly will take a negotiation. It probably will involve more schools leaving, as whispers have North Carolina, Clemson and Miami watching from the sideline with similar hopes.

The bottom line is the bottom line: Big Ten and Southeastern Conference schools get $70 million a year from their negotiated television deals. Florida State wants some of that compared to the ACC school’s $30 million. That’s not the full math, either.

ACC schools are locked into that deal through 2036 due to some seriously myopic vision from conference officials about the changing state of television. That annual $40 million difference is a yearly shortfall that will affect recruiting, facilities, coaches and, suddenly, players salaries, too.

“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 conferences,” Florida State wrote in its lawsuit.

Florida State would pay the $130 million exit fee from the ACC in a heartbeat. It’s the added, annual fees it would have to pay that are the sticking point. They could run the tab to over $500 million, as the ACC sees it. FSU’s lawyers see another way out.

FSU saw a moment of opportunity to announce its bold plan. It wrapped a need for greed into the larger anger of the playoff snub, as if had FSU been in an SEC team, it would have been invited to the playoff.

Maybe it’s right, too. Maybe TV ratings demand an SEC power. But FSU’s snub is irrelevant to the lawsuit. The only change if FSU was in the playoff is that its legal fight with the ACC wouldn’t have been announced before the game. Distraction. Bad publicity. Whatever.

As it is, no one’s talking about FSU’s lawsuit this game because so few are talking about the game. What started as the Snub Bowl between the two angry teams left out of the playoffs has devolved into something lesser with Florida State’s vanishing team.

“Unconquered,’’ read the school-issued shirt Atkins wore Wednesday for the Orange Bowl.

That team will remain so, too. This one playing Georgia is full of so many replacements FSU fans might want to look at the bigger, legal game coming.