I, uh, did not expect a Sehila Heti shoutout on a college football blog. Map and the Territory is by far the best Houellebecq IMO; much of the other stuff is, forgive me, Whatever.
Lawyer here. If the NCAA requested these through discovery (which is how you "ask" for documents from the other side in litigation), there would be a lot of hemming-and-hawing and steps taken to ensure only relevant texts were shared. There would also be a confidentiality order and the court would rain holy hell down a party that leaked any info like that found in discovery.
But we're not in a civil trial, we're in a NCAA investigation. Speaking super generally, unless it's a violation of privacy or other law (and I doubt it, but this isn't my field and I defer to others more expert), a court wouldn't intervene to quash this request or any subsequent punishment for failing to comply. In general, courts don't get involved in organizational internal affairs unless the organization violated its legal strictures (i.e. the bylaws / contract that govern, as a matter of law, the relationships between the organization and its members). It's totally imaginable to me that the court says these actions (i.e. disclose-or-sanction) are consistent with the NCAA's governing documents and accordingly wouldn't intervene.
Federal judges are entitled to a pension equal to their full salary when they hit retirement age. They literally aren't doing it for the money once they can leave, but most all stay on.
From my prior life clerking, it's definitely the case that some judges are independently wealthy. But many were civil servants or worked for public interest causes. There were some interpersonal tensions between the judges who didn't need the salary and those who did.
My point here is that it doesn't seem like Warde had a plan for the replacement process. It may have been the right call to retain Moore, I don't know. I'm not opposed to it! But it feels like Warde didn't make any plan for this transition, which is what I'm irked by.
In general, injunctions - court orders to do (or not do) stuff - are disfavored when money damages are available. The idea here is that, if the NCAA regulations violate the antitrust laws, the athletes can sue for - and win - cash. The judge isn't saying that it's OK that the athletes are injured by this law, but that money damages are reparable with cash.
I don't know, and it's not my job to know - I'm just some guy who posts on a Michigan forum. My point is that it doesn't seem like this transition was a thoughtful exercise and that was Manuel's job.
I mean, I'm going to fault Warde for poor execution. It's predictable that important people (most particularly Minter) were going to leave, and it's predictable that Harbaugh would be offering his guys to come with him. So why does it feel like there wasn't a plan in place to replace staff? Or, if your conclusion was you couldn't do much to keep the staff post-Harbaugh, should you have hired Moore as the continuity guy? I don't know.
I get it - Herb's a huge deal, sucks he's gone. But, like, we don't own him. Jim has the right to give Herbert an offer (and frankly, I think it's a sign of respect for Herb as a human being, because at a minimum it gave him negotiating leverage with M for a bigger contract). Herbert has the right to take it. Maybe a lot more $, maybe he wants a change of scenery, maybe he wants to try his hand at the pro game for a bit.
I guess my primary feeling is I'm grateful we won a natty, I'm grateful to Herbert for being a big part of that, and he's earned the right from me (which matters 0.00%, I'm just some dude online) to bounce to anywhere outside OSU. Onwards.
A couple modest points, from someone who's happy he's a lawyer (and FWIW I'm not a finance person but they're my bread-and-butter client base) but probably would have been something else if he had meaningful professional options at graduation:
He should do his damndest to find 1-3 mentors who are juniors, reasonably promptly. Maybe this is greek life, the dorm, a first generation students group, whatever. They should be doing the things he wants to do, so he can have the inside scoop. I cannot emphasize enough how important this is - he needs someone who will tell him what to do and when. I get the sense freshman summer internships are more and more possible.
What does "make a lot of money" mean? Beaucoup, beaucoup bucks (call it $600k annual comp) by 30 are probably in quantitative trading (math/cs majors, the entry level salary at e.g. Jane Street can be pretty offensive) or a hedge fund (take an analyst job for two years at an investment bank). Very good money but not as offensively rich (call it $600k net worth by 30 if you're investing a respectable portion of your take-home every year) would include, among others, private equity or FAANG-ish software engineering. But those are all extraordinarily demanding fields with very high competition every step of the way. "In the top 10% of America for the rest of my life" could come from CS / EE / SWE, IOE, statistics, or many of the things at Ross.
Minor in something writing-forward where the correct answer is ambiguous (read: a humanity). You would be shocked at the number of people who can't write (which is still a skill that matters), analyze complex situations, or effectively persuade. To stand out past the junior level, judgment is the secret sauce - and if you can't think critically outside a narrow framework with certain correct answers or persuade people that your conclusions are right, good luck and god bless.
Take classes with professors who invest in the students. Two of my professors (in fields totally unrelated to what I work in) are invaluable friends and life mentors. Having someone with a totally different approach and a lot more life experience in my corner was personally delightful and resulted in a lot of excellent, thoughtful advice.
Try a bunch of stuff and follow what sticks. I think many people in successful careers will say that they thought they were going to do X, but were exposed to Y and really loved it. Being dead-set on anything from day 1 can be rough if you really hate it, but the odds are good there's something you like in the pool if you look around.
I think people post about this in isolation, when you need to think about total $ commitment. I would want someone who's looking at this from a whole-team perspective so we can make sure we can actually pay out our promises.
At any rate, I'd offer around than 80% of what other programs are offering, but offer a no-bullshit form contract. 80% is (a) enough to be meaningful, a sensible person might be willing to take a 20% less pay for other reasons (while they probably couldn't take a 40%+ pay cut), (b) a big enough difference that someone who's only here for the cash wouldn't come.
The no-bullshit contract is important - there's a lot of noise out there from players that they heard $lots was coming their way but it never materialized. Actual, guaranteed dollars are a difference that we can execute on.
I also think the contract should have some amount of deferred comp. $x up front + $y if you stay three years (or the coaches bless your transfer, etc). It is weird that all NIL "contracts" are pure year-to-year.
Do we have any intel on how / why Michigan's scouting department has killed it? I presume that JH wasn't exactly grinding high school tape in his free time. The only two people I know who were specifically flagged as excellent talent evaluators are no longer with the program (Courtney Morgan as a west coast spotter and Don Brown's through the connection with all the New England prep schools).
Usually, the lawyers get involved after the principals reach an "agreement in principle," which is like a 1-2 page outline with the key terms (length, $$$, etc). After that, the lawyers turn that agreement in principle into a full contract, and usually the lawyers communicate directly on that because the principals' time is valuable and the disputes are pretty technical.
But they should have been talking about the immunity stuff. The lawyers can draft that whichever way the principals agree to do it, and the lawyers will not be the ones resolving that dispute. So I would have hoped they were in regular contact about that.
Obviously no inside information but I think it's not really money. I think that when a new HC comes in it's like you're joining a new team - new schemes, new coaches across the board, etc. So why not look around and go to a place where you had relationships through recruiting + that has stability? This goes double for defensive folks given that they were Nick's guys specifically.
I also am not sure that everyone in the portal will leave. Certainly some did (Bond, Downs) but others (Proctor) might end up staying depending on how they feel about the new staff. And some (Sayin, allegedly) were more-or-less told that DeBoer didn't like them as much as Nick did.
You have a source? I've seen a few articles where players are saying they aren't all millionaires at A&M, but I find it difficult to believe that A&M wasn't spending big during the late Jimbo era when they were pulling #1 classes and bidding-war guys like Walter Nolen.
I also would think that Bjork wouldn't be responsible for choosing who to pay and how much - his job is to get the money lines going and let the football people make the football decisions. But I don't have a source for that, just my intuition.
I think the argument is that Bjork is good at getting rich people to give lots of $$$ to NIL groups. I don't think Ryan Day is a real grip-and-grin mixer who can make every Chevy dealer in the greater Columbus area feel like he's the most important man in the room.
FWIW I also understand the OSU boosters are a bit needy. The stories you hear from Brian Schottenstein trying to run his own NIL collective, etc, maybe they wanted someone with experience in managing that kind of huge-ego booster, and Texas A&M/Ole Miss have some capital-p Psychos.
That said, weird hire because OSU probably has MBB and football hiring decisions to make in the next ~24 months, and nothing in Bjork's tenure suggests he'd do a good job at either.
I think the only advantage is certainty - you don't want a guy getting burned because you had a few less snaps than you thought during the course of the season, or a dude gets locked on the field during a tempo drive, or someone just fucks up counting, and poof goes a redshirt year. Something like four games or ~75 snaps.
I see where you're coming from. My point here is just that we shouldn't make Harbaugh "co-AD" or whatever.
For Shemy - I wasn't taking the nepotism angle as much as "do your homework on a guy before you hire him." It seems like nobody kicked the tires there.
On Stallions - he seems like a Very Weird Guy. Again, it feels like nobody kicked the tires, which is far more my concern.
I get why the waiver was denied, but I also feel for Taulia. Maybe a snap % makes more sense than a flat four-game counter for redshirts. Let guys play in garbage time!
But someone soon will sue the NCAA on this. Likely this cost TaTa a lot of scratch, as he's a viable college QB and I think his pro prospects are, uh, limited. He's not the only guy worth a lot on the college market who may not hang in the NFL.
On the one hand, yes, Warde should have stopped both - and I blame him in part for what happened. But I also think Harbaugh should have stopped it too: "I'm not responsible for the guys I want to hire" is a bad organizational attitude. That's not to say that JH should be running background checks personally. But as the head honcho, he should have made sure this stuff was managed.
I don't think Warde was going to go rogue and fire JH without having everyone on board.
I read the arbitration stuff very differently: it gives the employee a lot more leverage against a cause firing. A lawyer can object extensively to the process used by the arbitration panel. It'll take much longer to reach a result. The list goes on. If we decide to terminate JH at some point in the future, he's more likely to get a settlement (and a richer one) with extra procedural protections.
I'm not a Manuel fan. But these read to me as a man very concerned with the NCAA hammer.
I think people are remarkably blase about how easy it would be to have JH away from the program for a year or two. Having "shadow coach" just outside the facility will make management impossible. Who's in charge if Moore and Harbaugh disagree? (Easy to imagine camps of "Moore" and "Harbaugh" people.) If we need to hire an assistant, who signs off? If you're an assistant looking to get hired, why would you go to a place where the guy who hires you is getting demoted in a year?
And when JH comes back: what if JH has a few rough games? People will start clamoring for Moore and the way it was. Or, the more positive spin: what if the program is firing on all cylinders with Moore and people don't want to upset the applecart by demoting him in favor of a guy who's been tending chickens for two years? This is classic palace coup stuff. It's terrible juju.
Seems a bit conspiracy theory to me. I dunno, I would expect Catapult to talk to any large athletic department and it would be business suicide for them to share private videos. I would think there are a lot of firewalls around that stuff so random employee X couldn't just download everyone's practice film and hit the Silk Road or whatever.
Per my Bama fan friend, this has less to do with us and more with general paranoia. The fear is that an unhappy player or parent could record the practice video playing on their iPad. This happened before at Ohio State, where a long snapper sold practice video to a fan site. I'm not joking.
They aren't just developing you to be a pick, but developing you to be a star in the NFL. They'll train you in the fundamentals, etc, so you get that huge second contract.
If you're a 5-star, why do you care that it's not as impressive as developing a 3-star? You care about their track record with guys like you.
If I was negotiating for Michigan, I'd reject that for two reasons:
The sign stealing incidents and breakfast at the Jug were both under Harbaugh. They were in his program. It was his responsibility to run a clean ship (even if that just means hiring people to do it, etc, I'm not saying he personally should play Mr. Compliance). It's different if Harbaugh had no responsibility for that stuff. I don't know if M could fire Harbaugh now for cause under his current contract, but it strikes me as at least plausible.
Even if we think it's all bullshit, should we still pay Harbaugh out if he gets show caused for a few years? $10mm/yr while he hangs out in Baltimore? If you can't work, you don't get paid.
Probably the resolution is that he can't be fired for cause for the known NCAA investigations provided that (a) he and the program have shared all info with M and its people and (b) any penalty is less than [X] (3 games? 1 year? Just a negotiated point).
Even if Warde could fire JH, I don't think he would without signoff from the regents and Ono. Here's my breakdown (contract lawyer but haven't done much exec comp):
The NFL clause presumably will let M fire Harbaugh for cause (i.e. no more salary, etc) if he talks to a NFL team about an opening.
If teams are talking to Jim, he's probably doing well enough that we don't want to fire him. Like, if he talks to the Chargers this offseason, does anyone think we'll pop him?
The issue is whether, years down the line, M pulls this card out to get out of paying the balance of the contract. We have a bad year in 2028 and M says, "well, Jim, you talked to the Chargers in 2024, which violated your contract, so we're firing you for cause." There's a lot of ticky-tack bullshit like this with head coach firings, millions and millions on the line.
While not discussed (and I have zero knowledge of the JH situation beyond reading the same stuff everyone else), the interesting q for me is how we deal with the upcoming NCAA sanctions.
It seems typical to allow firing for cause if a head coach is suspended or show-caused by the NCAA.
But here, JH will say "you know this stuff is here, you've already investigated it, any consequences from the in-person scouting issue* or breakfast at the Jug shouldn't result in a cause firing. Otherwise this contract with me is basically just an option for you - if you like me, I stay, if you don't, you can kick me out in 6 months with no financial downside."
M will say, "cool, OK, but under your current contract we could fire you for that stuff, and besides we don't know how the NCAA will come down on us. If you get show-caused, you can't coach, and I can't pay you eight figures a year to hang out in Baltimore with John. This stuff is your fault, and we've gotta keep our options open on it."
The parties will eventually negotiate a resolution, probably with some degree of carve-out that depends on the total consequences from the NCAA.
I think JUB's point re the NFL clause - Harbaugh doesn't trust Warde and thinks he'll abuse any discretion M gets in the contract - is pretty misguided. Like, I'm down on Warde. I think he's been a bad to very bad AD. But there's a 0.00% chance that he can just pull the ripcord on JH. That's an Ono-and-Regents level decision. (Not to say Warde has no influence, obviously. But It's very much not his call alone.)
*M really should've gone Richard Nixon here and called it something other than SignGate or the Sign Stealing Scandal. Battle of words. "In-person scouting issue" is my position, but I'm game to hear better versions.
Imagine earning mid six figures a year from 18-22 and then being told "NCAA says you're out of eligibility, time to get a real job" and earning significantly less than that for the rest of your life. Sucks.
Also makes me wonder if someone will eventually sue the NCAA about eligibility limits. Lotta cash on the line for guys like Michael Sam who tore it up in college but just aren't NFL dudes. Taulia T seems to be moving in that direction (trying to get an extra year of eligibility because he "barely" burned his redshirt by playing like 20 snaps over 5 games as a frosh, I think).
No, I just think some kids only care about the bag and some kids care about a variety of stuff. M isn't going to be Big Bag School, so if you're going to choose the highest bidder, we're not going to win. But if you're a guy who wants to play for a winning team, develop, etc, we can pitch that. The dude who chooses Ole Miss is going to a school that is by no means a championship contender and doesn't have a track record of sending guys to the league.
The issue, IMO, is how we can stand out against UGa and Bama, who can offer both - a boatload of cash and a track record of national championship success/NFL placement.
I'm not sure what the value of a "No NFL" clause is. All this would do is give M the right to fire Harbaugh if he takes an interview. But I'm not sure why we'd want to do that, (we're hearing offers of >$10mm a season to coach here) and Harbaugh probably understands the power dynamics just as much.
I agree that it doesn't inspire confidence. What really surprises me is that Michigan was surprised by Partridge and Uncle T. The #1 reason you hire a big-gun investigations firm like Williams & Connolly is so you know what's going on. W&C's first job was to figure out exactly what had happened so M's leadership could know the stakes before making a play. For this to come out of left field is really disappointing.
I just don't think those cases are fair comps. When I think of the economists running up the bills I think (a) lost business damages and (b) antitrust suits. Here, it's just whether FSU leaving the ACC is > $120 mm in losses, which doesn't seem like it'll cause Charles River or CompassLexecon to break a sweat.
Anyways, from the complaint they hired Greenberg Traurig's Florida office, which isn't in the same $ tier as the firms we're discussing.
After reading the complaint - yikes. This is not a serious legal document. Not sure if FSU is high on its own supply, they think the lawsuit is going to fail and just want to get quotes for the newspapers, etc, but if I'm the ACC I feel better than I did a few days ago.
FSU goes very long on the ways the ACC did a bad job, true enough. But FSU doesn't actually make any arguments for why the contract should be void - it just states a bunch of conclusions. (The sole exception is the exit fee, where they at least do the basic work of explaining why it's more than the ACC's damages.)
That's not to say that the case is done-and-dusted, ACC wins, etc. But it is to say that this is not a document that inspires any confidence in FSU's underlying case or its lawyers.
I'm a lawyer too! But I would be surprised if you're burning more than $15mm on a case that doesn't seem to have fact issues.* Get your expert economists and handcuff the junior associates to their desks so they can spend all day on Westlaw. It's not cheap, but it's not something where FSU can so outspend the ACC that the ACC is at a huge disadvantage.
*Surely both sides will try some discovery, etc. But the issues raised here seem to sound purely legal, outside maybe the contract breach stuff.
So I think you're right and you're wrong. True, Partridge (and the booster funding Conor - I don't get why that matters, but people talk about it like it does) had nothing to do with Michigan's TRO case, which just asked if Harbaugh's suspension right then complied with the bylaws. Probably not. But settlements aren't just about the case in court, they're about the whole deal you get.
Those things may have convinced M that a B1G investigation, whenever it finished, might lead to a bigger penalty, so resolving it all for three games was worth it. Also, and not for nothing, getting investigators out of your hair is maybe goal #1 as a criminal defense attorney (which I'm not, FWIW). People do stupid shit when they know they're investigated (Partridge) and dealing with an investigation takes real people (not lawyers) a lot of time and effort.
There's only so much you can spend on this kind of litigation. Maybe $10, $15 mm? You know, a lot of money, but hardly earthshattering for the ACC.
The helpful comparison here is LIV v. PGA, where LIV was going to sue PGA for everything, all the time - defamation, antitrust, unfair competition, etc, etc, etc, and had Saudi Arabian oil money behind it. You can run an infinite-money litigation campaign to beat the other side to death, but a narrow contract dispute isn't the way to go.
It's weird that the ACC member schools approved it but I totally get why ESPN (a) wanted to be able to walk away whenever and (b) wanted to make sure that the ACC was around if it wanted to keep the deal going.
The "can't see the contract except in person" is very weird. I've never heard of that happening to contracts that you are party to. I know that happens with all kinds of confidential documents, but that's wild.
The withdrawal penalty argument could be very strong. Basically in the US the fee for breaking a contract is just the economic damages it causes the other person. You can't have a "penalty" that goes above that.
Public policy is a weak argument. That's just "don't enforce this very mean contract," which very rarely works. FSU was a sophisticated party that signed the GoR of its own free will, which is usually all it takes to defeat this.
"Restraint on trade" sounds unusual, that's an antitrust-ish argument. No idea how it comes out but it doesn't seem like the ACC holds a monopoly on football and used it to harm FSU.
The ACC shouldn't have a fiduciary duty to FSU - that's not how fiduciary duties work. (A fiduciary duty is basically a duty of total loyalty - but it's essentially impossible to satisfy fiduciary duties to multiple parties with divergent interests, like FSU and all the other conference members.)
The contract breach claims may have merit, but the remedy for breach of a contract isn't always cancellation.
What's more interesting to me is that they're pressing seven claims. That's a lot; usually people who are confident in their arguments pick the 2-3 strongest ones and hammer them; 7 arguments smells like "spaghetti at the wall."
There's a long timeline here if this case is litigated - maybe 18 months from filing to get a first decision (but it could be longer), another year for an appeal, and then again when they appeal to the Supreme Court (which may or may not accept, but it'll be 4-5 months while they decide, probably). They could settle at any time during this process.
As the guy who said yesterday that FSU looked bad for constantly saying they'd do something about the ACC without doing anything, kudos to them for giving it a shot.
I know Sixth Street a bit; worked with them in the past.
Shot in the dark, but I could Sixth Street putting down the $120 million as a loan for FSU today so they could leave the ACC now and charge a high interest rate + get a pledge of new conference money. FSU litigates whether or not they actually owe the $120 but that's just money after the fact.
In the alternative, Sixth Street might "purchase" some FSU rights - media, tickets, advertising, etc - and FSU uses the proceeds to pay down the ACC. Looks like they've floated that in the past.
I'm a lawyer; I do complex contract litigation. If you have a strong claim, you sue. If you don't have a claim, you make lots of noise about how you're definitely absolutely going to sue because (a) someone might think you'll litigate and (b) you won't reveal how weak your hand is. "I sent my lawyers to look at your document really hard" doesn't scare me a whit, "here's a five page memo explaining why your document is void and unenforcable" could.
Warde is the guy in charge of off-field sports stuff. What part of our response to the NCAA isn't on him? (What part of it are you impressed by?) Shit, I blame him for not setting up a better HR function; if this was Alabama I don't think Conor makes the staff.
I dunno. Seems like he was a M take without the letter. If you're Nua, you probably feel like you've lost the guy regardless but want to keep a good relationship in case he goes on the transfer market for some reason. I could see why a SC fan would be unhappy, though.
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I, uh, did not expect a Sehila Heti shoutout on a college football blog. Map and the Territory is by far the best Houellebecq IMO; much of the other stuff is, forgive me, Whatever.
Seconding Percival Everett, an outstanding writer. If you haven't read Roth's Deception yet, I encourage you to take a look.
Crabgrass Frontier is outstanding. There's a lot of good history of the suburbs out there now. Worth reading.
Orgeron got canned a year after winning it all.
Lawyer here. If the NCAA requested these through discovery (which is how you "ask" for documents from the other side in litigation), there would be a lot of hemming-and-hawing and steps taken to ensure only relevant texts were shared. There would also be a confidentiality order and the court would rain holy hell down a party that leaked any info like that found in discovery.
But we're not in a civil trial, we're in a NCAA investigation. Speaking super generally, unless it's a violation of privacy or other law (and I doubt it, but this isn't my field and I defer to others more expert), a court wouldn't intervene to quash this request or any subsequent punishment for failing to comply. In general, courts don't get involved in organizational internal affairs unless the organization violated its legal strictures (i.e. the bylaws / contract that govern, as a matter of law, the relationships between the organization and its members). It's totally imaginable to me that the court says these actions (i.e. disclose-or-sanction) are consistent with the NCAA's governing documents and accordingly wouldn't intervene.
Federal judges are entitled to a pension equal to their full salary when they hit retirement age. They literally aren't doing it for the money once they can leave, but most all stay on.
From my prior life clerking, it's definitely the case that some judges are independently wealthy. But many were civil servants or worked for public interest causes. There were some interpersonal tensions between the judges who didn't need the salary and those who did.
My point here is that it doesn't seem like Warde had a plan for the replacement process. It may have been the right call to retain Moore, I don't know. I'm not opposed to it! But it feels like Warde didn't make any plan for this transition, which is what I'm irked by.
In general, injunctions - court orders to do (or not do) stuff - are disfavored when money damages are available. The idea here is that, if the NCAA regulations violate the antitrust laws, the athletes can sue for - and win - cash. The judge isn't saying that it's OK that the athletes are injured by this law, but that money damages are reparable with cash.
Source: lawyer.
I don't know, and it's not my job to know - I'm just some guy who posts on a Michigan forum. My point is that it doesn't seem like this transition was a thoughtful exercise and that was Manuel's job.
I mean, I'm going to fault Warde for poor execution. It's predictable that important people (most particularly Minter) were going to leave, and it's predictable that Harbaugh would be offering his guys to come with him. So why does it feel like there wasn't a plan in place to replace staff? Or, if your conclusion was you couldn't do much to keep the staff post-Harbaugh, should you have hired Moore as the continuity guy? I don't know.
Amen. I'm bummed people are leaving, but like ... c'mon, they won us a natty. They've "earned" the right to make a lot of cash in sunny Los Angeles.
I get it - Herb's a huge deal, sucks he's gone. But, like, we don't own him. Jim has the right to give Herbert an offer (and frankly, I think it's a sign of respect for Herb as a human being, because at a minimum it gave him negotiating leverage with M for a bigger contract). Herbert has the right to take it. Maybe a lot more $, maybe he wants a change of scenery, maybe he wants to try his hand at the pro game for a bit.
I guess my primary feeling is I'm grateful we won a natty, I'm grateful to Herbert for being a big part of that, and he's earned the right from me (which matters 0.00%, I'm just some dude online) to bounce to anywhere outside OSU. Onwards.
A couple modest points, from someone who's happy he's a lawyer (and FWIW I'm not a finance person but they're my bread-and-butter client base) but probably would have been something else if he had meaningful professional options at graduation:
I think people post about this in isolation, when you need to think about total $ commitment. I would want someone who's looking at this from a whole-team perspective so we can make sure we can actually pay out our promises.
At any rate, I'd offer around than 80% of what other programs are offering, but offer a no-bullshit form contract. 80% is (a) enough to be meaningful, a sensible person might be willing to take a 20% less pay for other reasons (while they probably couldn't take a 40%+ pay cut), (b) a big enough difference that someone who's only here for the cash wouldn't come.
The no-bullshit contract is important - there's a lot of noise out there from players that they heard $lots was coming their way but it never materialized. Actual, guaranteed dollars are a difference that we can execute on.
I also think the contract should have some amount of deferred comp. $x up front + $y if you stay three years (or the coaches bless your transfer, etc). It is weird that all NIL "contracts" are pure year-to-year.
Do we have any intel on how / why Michigan's scouting department has killed it? I presume that JH wasn't exactly grinding high school tape in his free time. The only two people I know who were specifically flagged as excellent talent evaluators are no longer with the program (Courtney Morgan as a west coast spotter and Don Brown's through the connection with all the New England prep schools).
Lawyerchat: normally, no. In this case, yes.
Usually, the lawyers get involved after the principals reach an "agreement in principle," which is like a 1-2 page outline with the key terms (length, $$$, etc). After that, the lawyers turn that agreement in principle into a full contract, and usually the lawyers communicate directly on that because the principals' time is valuable and the disputes are pretty technical.
But they should have been talking about the immunity stuff. The lawyers can draft that whichever way the principals agree to do it, and the lawyers will not be the ones resolving that dispute. So I would have hoped they were in regular contact about that.
Obviously no inside information but I think it's not really money. I think that when a new HC comes in it's like you're joining a new team - new schemes, new coaches across the board, etc. So why not look around and go to a place where you had relationships through recruiting + that has stability? This goes double for defensive folks given that they were Nick's guys specifically.
I also am not sure that everyone in the portal will leave. Certainly some did (Bond, Downs) but others (Proctor) might end up staying depending on how they feel about the new staff. And some (Sayin, allegedly) were more-or-less told that DeBoer didn't like them as much as Nick did.
You have a source? I've seen a few articles where players are saying they aren't all millionaires at A&M, but I find it difficult to believe that A&M wasn't spending big during the late Jimbo era when they were pulling #1 classes and bidding-war guys like Walter Nolen.
I also would think that Bjork wouldn't be responsible for choosing who to pay and how much - his job is to get the money lines going and let the football people make the football decisions. But I don't have a source for that, just my intuition.
I think the argument is that Bjork is good at getting rich people to give lots of $$$ to NIL groups. I don't think Ryan Day is a real grip-and-grin mixer who can make every Chevy dealer in the greater Columbus area feel like he's the most important man in the room.
FWIW I also understand the OSU boosters are a bit needy. The stories you hear from Brian Schottenstein trying to run his own NIL collective, etc, maybe they wanted someone with experience in managing that kind of huge-ego booster, and Texas A&M/Ole Miss have some capital-p Psychos.
That said, weird hire because OSU probably has MBB and football hiring decisions to make in the next ~24 months, and nothing in Bjork's tenure suggests he'd do a good job at either.
I think the only advantage is certainty - you don't want a guy getting burned because you had a few less snaps than you thought during the course of the season, or a dude gets locked on the field during a tempo drive, or someone just fucks up counting, and poof goes a redshirt year. Something like four games or ~75 snaps.
I see where you're coming from. My point here is just that we shouldn't make Harbaugh "co-AD" or whatever.
For Shemy - I wasn't taking the nepotism angle as much as "do your homework on a guy before you hire him." It seems like nobody kicked the tires there.
On Stallions - he seems like a Very Weird Guy. Again, it feels like nobody kicked the tires, which is far more my concern.
I get why the waiver was denied, but I also feel for Taulia. Maybe a snap % makes more sense than a flat four-game counter for redshirts. Let guys play in garbage time!
But someone soon will sue the NCAA on this. Likely this cost TaTa a lot of scratch, as he's a viable college QB and I think his pro prospects are, uh, limited. He's not the only guy worth a lot on the college market who may not hang in the NFL.
On the one hand, yes, Warde should have stopped both - and I blame him in part for what happened. But I also think Harbaugh should have stopped it too: "I'm not responsible for the guys I want to hire" is a bad organizational attitude. That's not to say that JH should be running background checks personally. But as the head honcho, he should have made sure this stuff was managed.
I don't think Warde was going to go rogue and fire JH without having everyone on board.
I read the arbitration stuff very differently: it gives the employee a lot more leverage against a cause firing. A lawyer can object extensively to the process used by the arbitration panel. It'll take much longer to reach a result. The list goes on. If we decide to terminate JH at some point in the future, he's more likely to get a settlement (and a richer one) with extra procedural protections.
I'm not a Manuel fan. But these read to me as a man very concerned with the NCAA hammer.
I think people are remarkably blase about how easy it would be to have JH away from the program for a year or two. Having "shadow coach" just outside the facility will make management impossible. Who's in charge if Moore and Harbaugh disagree? (Easy to imagine camps of "Moore" and "Harbaugh" people.) If we need to hire an assistant, who signs off? If you're an assistant looking to get hired, why would you go to a place where the guy who hires you is getting demoted in a year?
And when JH comes back: what if JH has a few rough games? People will start clamoring for Moore and the way it was. Or, the more positive spin: what if the program is firing on all cylinders with Moore and people don't want to upset the applecart by demoting him in favor of a guy who's been tending chickens for two years? This is classic palace coup stuff. It's terrible juju.
Seems a bit conspiracy theory to me. I dunno, I would expect Catapult to talk to any large athletic department and it would be business suicide for them to share private videos. I would think there are a lot of firewalls around that stuff so random employee X couldn't just download everyone's practice film and hit the Silk Road or whatever.
Learn something new every day. Thanks!
Per my Bama fan friend, this has less to do with us and more with general paranoia. The fear is that an unhappy player or parent could record the practice video playing on their iPad. This happened before at Ohio State, where a long snapper sold practice video to a fan site. I'm not joking.
What's this?
Maybe stupid, but you describe him as black-wooled. I assumed they're born hairless, is that wrong?
I mean the counterarguments would be:
If I was negotiating for Michigan, I'd reject that for two reasons:
Probably the resolution is that he can't be fired for cause for the known NCAA investigations provided that (a) he and the program have shared all info with M and its people and (b) any penalty is less than [X] (3 games? 1 year? Just a negotiated point).
Even if Warde could fire JH, I don't think he would without signoff from the regents and Ono. Here's my breakdown (contract lawyer but haven't done much exec comp):
I think JUB's point re the NFL clause - Harbaugh doesn't trust Warde and thinks he'll abuse any discretion M gets in the contract - is pretty misguided. Like, I'm down on Warde. I think he's been a bad to very bad AD. But there's a 0.00% chance that he can just pull the ripcord on JH. That's an Ono-and-Regents level decision. (Not to say Warde has no influence, obviously. But It's very much not his call alone.)
*M really should've gone Richard Nixon here and called it something other than SignGate or the Sign Stealing Scandal. Battle of words. "In-person scouting issue" is my position, but I'm game to hear better versions.
Imagine earning mid six figures a year from 18-22 and then being told "NCAA says you're out of eligibility, time to get a real job" and earning significantly less than that for the rest of your life. Sucks.
Also makes me wonder if someone will eventually sue the NCAA about eligibility limits. Lotta cash on the line for guys like Michael Sam who tore it up in college but just aren't NFL dudes. Taulia T seems to be moving in that direction (trying to get an extra year of eligibility because he "barely" burned his redshirt by playing like 20 snaps over 5 games as a frosh, I think).
No, I just think some kids only care about the bag and some kids care about a variety of stuff. M isn't going to be Big Bag School, so if you're going to choose the highest bidder, we're not going to win. But if you're a guy who wants to play for a winning team, develop, etc, we can pitch that. The dude who chooses Ole Miss is going to a school that is by no means a championship contender and doesn't have a track record of sending guys to the league.
The issue, IMO, is how we can stand out against UGa and Bama, who can offer both - a boatload of cash and a track record of national championship success/NFL placement.
I'm not sure what the value of a "No NFL" clause is. All this would do is give M the right to fire Harbaugh if he takes an interview. But I'm not sure why we'd want to do that, (we're hearing offers of >$10mm a season to coach here) and Harbaugh probably understands the power dynamics just as much.
I agree that it doesn't inspire confidence. What really surprises me is that Michigan was surprised by Partridge and Uncle T. The #1 reason you hire a big-gun investigations firm like Williams & Connolly is so you know what's going on. W&C's first job was to figure out exactly what had happened so M's leadership could know the stakes before making a play. For this to come out of left field is really disappointing.
I just don't think those cases are fair comps. When I think of the economists running up the bills I think (a) lost business damages and (b) antitrust suits. Here, it's just whether FSU leaving the ACC is > $120 mm in losses, which doesn't seem like it'll cause Charles River or CompassLexecon to break a sweat.
Anyways, from the complaint they hired Greenberg Traurig's Florida office, which isn't in the same $ tier as the firms we're discussing.
After reading the complaint - yikes. This is not a serious legal document. Not sure if FSU is high on its own supply, they think the lawsuit is going to fail and just want to get quotes for the newspapers, etc, but if I'm the ACC I feel better than I did a few days ago.
FSU goes very long on the ways the ACC did a bad job, true enough. But FSU doesn't actually make any arguments for why the contract should be void - it just states a bunch of conclusions. (The sole exception is the exit fee, where they at least do the basic work of explaining why it's more than the ACC's damages.)
That's not to say that the case is done-and-dusted, ACC wins, etc. But it is to say that this is not a document that inspires any confidence in FSU's underlying case or its lawyers.
I don't think it's crazy to conclude that the BOT meeting was a prelude to filing the suit.
As to the precedent, as I read it that goes to the $ penalty, but not the grant of rights, which appears to be the big thing.
The ACC wants this suit to not be in Florida. If you're going to get sued anyways, there are advantages to moving first.
I'm a lawyer too! But I would be surprised if you're burning more than $15mm on a case that doesn't seem to have fact issues.* Get your expert economists and handcuff the junior associates to their desks so they can spend all day on Westlaw. It's not cheap, but it's not something where FSU can so outspend the ACC that the ACC is at a huge disadvantage.
*Surely both sides will try some discovery, etc. But the issues raised here seem to sound purely legal, outside maybe the contract breach stuff.
So I think you're right and you're wrong. True, Partridge (and the booster funding Conor - I don't get why that matters, but people talk about it like it does) had nothing to do with Michigan's TRO case, which just asked if Harbaugh's suspension right then complied with the bylaws. Probably not. But settlements aren't just about the case in court, they're about the whole deal you get.
Those things may have convinced M that a B1G investigation, whenever it finished, might lead to a bigger penalty, so resolving it all for three games was worth it. Also, and not for nothing, getting investigators out of your hair is maybe goal #1 as a criminal defense attorney (which I'm not, FWIW). People do stupid shit when they know they're investigated (Partridge) and dealing with an investigation takes real people (not lawyers) a lot of time and effort.
There's only so much you can spend on this kind of litigation. Maybe $10, $15 mm? You know, a lot of money, but hardly earthshattering for the ACC.
The helpful comparison here is LIV v. PGA, where LIV was going to sue PGA for everything, all the time - defamation, antitrust, unfair competition, etc, etc, etc, and had Saudi Arabian oil money behind it. You can run an infinite-money litigation campaign to beat the other side to death, but a narrow contract dispute isn't the way to go.
It's weird that the ACC member schools approved it but I totally get why ESPN (a) wanted to be able to walk away whenever and (b) wanted to make sure that the ACC was around if it wanted to keep the deal going.
The …
My sense as a lawyer:
What's more interesting to me is that they're pressing seven claims. That's a lot; usually people who are confident in their arguments pick the 2-3 strongest ones and hammer them; 7 arguments smells like "spaghetti at the wall."
There's a long timeline here if this case is litigated - maybe 18 months from filing to get a first decision (but it could be longer), another year for an appeal, and then again when they appeal to the Supreme Court (which may or may not accept, but it'll be 4-5 months while they decide, probably). They could settle at any time during this process.
As the guy who said yesterday that FSU looked bad for constantly saying they'd do something about the ACC without doing anything, kudos to them for giving it a shot.
I know Sixth Street a bit; worked with them in the past.
Shot in the dark, but I could Sixth Street putting down the $120 million as a loan for FSU today so they could leave the ACC now and charge a high interest rate + get a pledge of new conference money. FSU litigates whether or not they actually owe the $120 but that's just money after the fact.
In the alternative, Sixth Street might "purchase" some FSU rights - media, tickets, advertising, etc - and FSU uses the proceeds to pay down the ACC. Looks like they've floated that in the past.
I'm a lawyer; I do complex contract litigation. If you have a strong claim, you sue. If you don't have a claim, you make lots of noise about how you're definitely absolutely going to sue because (a) someone might think you'll litigate and (b) you won't reveal how weak your hand is. "I sent my lawyers to look at your document really hard" doesn't scare me a whit, "here's a five page memo explaining why your document is void and unenforcable" could.
Warde is the guy in charge of off-field sports stuff. What part of our response to the NCAA isn't on him? (What part of it are you impressed by?) Shit, I blame him for not setting up a better HR function; if this was Alabama I don't think Conor makes the staff.
I dunno. Seems like he was a M take without the letter. If you're Nua, you probably feel like you've lost the guy regardless but want to keep a good relationship in case he goes on the transfer market for some reason. I could see why a SC fan would be unhappy, though.