Florida State University has called an emergency virtual meeting for its board of trustees for 10 a.m. Friday.

A meeting agenda is not yet public. Routine board meetings about legislative budget requests or funding metrics receive little advance fanfare — and certainly not an advisory from the athletic department like the one sent out Thursday morning.

This, then, does not appear to be a routine meeting. It comes after weeks of speculation about the next step in a complicated process that has been brewing for months.

The Seminoles have grumbled privately about the ACC’s finances for years. Those frustrations turned public in February when athletic director Michael Alford showed financial projections to the trustees. Those projections included a $30 million annual gap between what FSU makes from the ACC and what competitors like Florida, Alabama and Michigan make from the SEC/Big Ten.

“We have to do something,” board chairperson Peter Collins said then.

The conversation was renewed with more urgency in August at another board meeting. FSU president Richard McCullough raised the possibility of leaving the league unless something changed with the finances.

One trustee, Justin Roth, called it “death by a thousand cuts — and each cut is a $30 million cut over the next 13 years.” Another, former FSU quarterback Drew Weatherford, said it was no longer a matter of if the Seminoles leave the ACC; it was, barring a major change from the league, “a matter of how and when we leave.”

Those answers are expected to become clearer Friday. The first question: Is there a way out of the ACC by breaking what’s called a grant of rights? That document binds schools (like FSU) to a conference (ACC), in this case through the 2035-36 school year. Schools grant the rights to broadcast home athletic events to the conference. The conference then sells them (to ESPN in this case), and the conference distributes that money back to the schools.

Another not-yet-answered question: If the Seminoles can wriggle out of the ACC, where would would they go? The only comparable or superior conferences to the ACC are the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12. The Big 12 would face a similar revenue gap. The SEC already has a team in the state (the Gators) and might not want to add another. The Big Ten typically only adds schools that are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities; FSU is not on that list, though USF is.

Speculation around the Seminoles’ conference affiliation trickled into the season. FSU routinely shared its strong TV ratings on social media — a rarity in the industry.

Other athletic issues around FSU have come up, too. The Seminoles have pursued potential private-equity investments, as the sports business website Sportico reported in August.

FSU also missed out on the College Football Playoff this month, despite finishing 13-0. Alabama, the 12-1 SEC champion, took the final spot. That snub has drawn attention from some of the state’s most prominent politicians, including Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott. Attorney General Ashley Moody has started an antitrust investigation into the playoff.

FSU’s exclusion also amplified the buzz around its future. Did the selection committee’s decision give the Seminoles the moral high ground to make a seismic move? Can it become part of a legal argument to allow FSU to wriggle out of its grant of rights with the ACC? Was the blow so powerful to FSU’s power brokers that it sped up the timeline for a potential departure?

Expect to learn the answers soon.