FSU releases documents; NCAA appeals to Florida Supreme Court

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is making a final push to take its open-records appeal to the Florida Supreme Court even as Florida State University officials released the documents.

Florida State officials have released a transcript of an October 2008 hearing in the university's sanctions appeal. Copies are available at a commercial copying business in Tallahassee. An employee said the 700-page transcript of the NCAA's committee on infractions meeting in Indianapolois a year ago was dropped off by FSU employees this morning.

Earlier this year, the day after the lawsuit was filed, the NCAA told FSU it would not object to releasing a transcribed version of the governing group's response to the university's appeal. A certified transcript was released by the university with student names redacted.

The Indianapolis-based national governing group this morning formally called for the state's highest court to exercise its discretionary power to review a 1st District Court of Appeal decision. The NCAA has lost at two lower courts in a media-funded lawsuit to force records open in a Florida State case.

It will be difficult to get the Supreme Court to agree. In Florida's court system, district court's are the final stop unless a decision there, in the opinion of the high court's justices, is of great public importance or directly conflicts with a ruling of another district court. Judges of the 1st District Court of Appeal rejected the NCAA's request to certify the case for Supreme Court review.

The NCAA's notice this morning says the ruling against it "expressly and directly conflicts with a decision of another district court of appeal or of the Supreme Court on the same question of law." The notice does not specify the conflict.

The Tallahassee Democrat, Gannett Co.'s Florida newspapers and television stations and more than 20 other media outlets, including The Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and News Channel 8, filed the lawsuit in June. A Leon County circuit court judge said a secure Web site set up by the NCAA for FSU officials didn't exclude from the state's open-records laws documents the university's lawyers viewed.

Judge John Cooper ordered two documents in FSU's ongoing appeal of athletic sanctions released, with student names blacked out.

But those records had remained sealed while the NCAA appealed the ruling in court. On Tuesday, the appellate court issued its mandate in an earlier opinion upholding Cooper's decision and rejecting the NCAA's request for a rehearing. That mandate makes the case final.