The Rashada lawsuit will prove to be a very expensive nuisance

A few thoughts to jump start your Wednesday morning:

Tuesday in a Pensacola U.S. District Court, former Florida football staffer Marcus Castro-Walker, businessman/booster Hugh Hathcock and Florida football coach Billy Napier responded with three motions to dismiss the $10 million lawsuit filed back in May by quarterback Jaden Rashada. Rashada is a former UF signee (2022), now a backup quarterback at Georgia after a year at Arizona State.

Rashada’s lawsuit, filed by prominent Houston attorney Rusty Hardin, alleges fraudulent misrepresentation and inducement, aiding and abetting fraud, civil conspiracy to commit fraud, negligent misrepresentations, tortious interference with a business relationship or contract, aiding and abetting tortious interference and vicarious liability in a name, image and likeness deal that went south. Originally committed to Miami, Rashada flipped to Florida on November 10, 2022 due to a Florida offer of $13.85 million spearheaded by Hathcock and his Velocity Automotive Solutions LLC plus the Gator Collective.

The lawsuit alleges that Florida never really wanted Rashada but made the $13.85 NIL offer to lure him away from Miami and its $9.5 million deal. Miami mega-booster John Ruiz told The Athletic back in May that no such deal was ever made.

Hal Lewis of the Tallahassee law firm Fonvielle Lewis Messer & McConnaughhay filed the first motion to dismiss on behalf of Castro-Walker. In his 18-page response, Lewis wrote that “a thorough re-reading of the Complaint after knowing how the story ends would fail to uncover even a single bread crumb of evidence that even remotely supported the ending.”

Henry Coxe III of the Jacksonville law firm Bedell, Dittmar, Devault, Pillans & Coxe, filed a 29-page motion to dismiss on Napier’s behalf, claiming the facts are “sorely lacking from the complaint.” The response also claims that there is nothing in the Rashada suit that “supports that Napier participated in any wrongdoing” and that the complaint makes clear that Napier could not have defrauded Rashada, since the sole statement attributed to Napier is alleged to have been made after Rashada had already abandoned the Miami NIL deal."

Jason Peterson of the Clark Partington firm in Pensacola that represents Hathcock wrote in his dismissal motion that "Some variation of the word 'promise' appears at least 50 times in the complaint, yet there is no breach-of-contract count."

Nobody is denying that a ridiculous $13.85 million NIL deal was offered to Rashada. What happened after that is like the plot of a soap opera complete with twists, turns, finger-pointing and Napier allegedly vouching for the Gator Collective and its promise to pay Rashada $1 million on National Signing Day. Rashada signed with the Gators after a bit of a delay, but a couple of weeks later asked for and was granted a release from his National Letter of Intent.

If the motions to dismiss are rejected, Hardin wants a jury trial. Will it ever get that far? Whether or not Rashada’s allegations are fact-based, a trial could take days or even weeks to unravel the truth causing embarrassment for everyone involved. Which is more prudent for Billy Napier? To spend all that time in a court room away from his team, away from recruiting, or write a check to make this lawsuit go away?

Is Rusty Hardin amenable to a settlement or is he thinking how this trial could be a test balloon capable of luring athletes who feel they were lied to or deceived? If he’s successful in winning the Rashada case in court or agreeing to a large settlement, then he will be a magnet for other athletes who made NIL deals that were never consummated or perhaps the money dried up.

At the heart of this matter is the NCAA, whose lack of leadership has led to an out of control situation with NIL. There are no guardrails or sufficient parameters in place to prevent cases like this popping up all over the country. So brace yourself. Lawsuits like this could be the norm for years to come.  

CAGLIANONE SIGNS WITH ROYALS

The Kansas City Royals announced via Twitter Tuesday night that they have come to terms with two-way player Jac Caglianone, taken with the sixth pick of the first round in the Major League Baseball Draft. Terms of the contract were not immediately disclosed although Caglianone has a slot value of $7.21 million.

Also signed: Shortstop Kellon Lindsey (Wauchula, FL Hardee County), taken with the 23rd pick of the first round by the Los Angeles Dodgers, signed for $3.3 million … Reliever Fisher Jameson, a 10th-round pick of the Colorado Rockies, signed for $185,800 .... Reliever Ryan Slater, taken in the 18th round by the San Francisco Giants, signed for $125,000.   

Still unsigned: Closer Brandon Neely, a third-round selection of the Boston Red Sox, has a slot value of $878,800 … Shortstop Brendan Lawson (Toronto, Canada/Lexington, SC P27 Academy) was taken in the 19th-round by the St. Louis Cardinals. He made it clear he will be a Gator in the fall … Shortstop/third baseman Colby Shelton, a 20th-round pick of the Washington Nationals, is playing in the Cape Cod Summer League. When Shelton wasn’t taken in the first three rounds it was assumed he will be returning to Florida, so taking him in the 20th-round is more or less a Hail Mary pick by the Nationals. Shelton has two seasons of eligibility remaining.

SEC sports stuff

Alabama: From here on out, it will be Nick Saban Field at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Alabama will officially dedicate the playing field September 7 when South Florida comes to Tuscaloosa to play.

Auburn: Running back Brian Battie, who was shot in the head in Sarasota back in May, is able to walk again with the use of a cane.

Georgia: Charlie Condon, taken third in the recent Major League Baseball Draft by the Colorado Rockies, signed a record-tying $9.25 million bonus.

Kentucky: Mark Stoops is now the dean of Southeastern Conference football coaches with 12 years on the job. Stoops, who has two of the four 10-win seasons in UK history, has taken the Wildcats to eight consecutive bowl games.

LSU: Defensive back Javien Toviano has been suspended from all team activities following an arrest for video voyeurism. A New Orleans woman discovered videos of her having sex with Taviano on Taviano’s iPad. The woman says she didn’t give Taviano permission to video their sexual encounters.

Vanderbilt: The starting quarterback job will be between Utah transfer Nate Johnson and New Mexico State transfer Diego Pavia.

Little Jimmy Phillips reads the riot act to Florida State and Clemson

It has taken awhile, but Atlantic Coast commissioner Little Jimmy Phillips finally seems to have the nerve to publicly stand up to the bullying from Florida State and Clemson, which have filed lawsuits against the league in an attempt to escape from the league’s grant of rights contract with ESPN that runs through 2036. Phillips took to the podium Monday for his state of the league address at ACC Media Days, promising FSU, Clemson and whoever else has an interest in leaving the league that the ACC is prepared to fight it out in the courts for as many years as it takes to keep the conference intact.  

At the heart of the matter is money, but isn’t that what always drives conference realignment? The Southeastern Conference with its new media deal with ESPN will be paying somewhere around $70-75 million per school in the next two years. It is expected that higher television ratings from the addition of Texas and Oklahoma will result in ESPN rewriting the contract and pushing per school revenues closer to $100 million per year. The Big Ten has a new media deal with Fox, CBS and NBC that is expected to pay more than the SEC at least in the short term.

Meanwhile, ACC teams are shackled by their media deal that will take a few more years before it distributes $50 million per school. That FSU and Clemson want to keep up with their cousins in the SEC and Big Ten is understandable, but that’s something they should have thought about prior to signing the grant of rights not just once but twice.

“The fact is that every member of this conference willingly signed the grant of rights unanimously and, quite frankly, eagerly agreed to our current television contract and the launch of the ACC Network,” Phillips said.

The rebuke by Phillips comes a week after FSU and Clemson got some comeuppance when SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and several league presidents let it be known they aren’t interested in further expansion, much less inviting FSU and Clemson to join, nor are they interested in getting tied up in the courts for years to come. The ACC is not only willing to fight schools that wish to secede in court for however long it takes to win, but it will drag into court any league that offers sanctuary to rebellious ACC members. That wasn’t lost on Sankey and SEC presidents. They just don’t need the hassles.

All of this flies directly in the face of activist FSU and Clemson boosters who have spent the last few months claiming a deal to join either the SEC or Big Ten is imminent. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT:  Here we are, a little less than six weeks from the start of the college football season and there is no Pac-12 Conference. It just doesn’t seem right that the Conference of Champions has been reduced to two irrelevant schools that can’t seem to make a deal to merge with the Mountain West Conference to provide a prominent league on the left coast.

We could see the Pac-12 about to become a train wreck years ago when Larry Scott became the commissioner. He arrived with much fanfare and boasts about making the Pac-12 a cutting edge league. He left with a trail of broken promises in his wake. The Pac-12 presidents then made the mistake of hiring George Kliavkoff, another dreamer who lacked the ability to make dreams and visions for the league to come true.

Bad leadership resulted in Southern Cal, UCLA, Washington and Oregon leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado left for the Big 12. Faced with forming a league that included academic lightweights Washington State and Oregon State, Stanford and California elected to join the Atlantic Coast Conference where they felt more in tune with the likes of Virginia, North Carolina, Duke and Georgia Tech.

I look at all these new conference affiliations and I just shake my head. I guess I’m just too much of a traditionalist. The lure of college football has always been about the rivalries. I guess that’s why I’m such a diehard SEC guy. Sure, I grew up in the south and my first college football memories were at Florida Field watching the Gators go for two to beat Georgia Tech in 1960 or seeing Steve Spurrier wave Charlie Casey into the end zone as Florida came from behind to beat Florida State in 1965.

I’ve always appreciated walking through the tailgaters and smelling ribs on a grill as fans from rival schools share a beer and food before making their way into the stadium. The walk through The Grove in Oxford can’t be replicated anywhere else. Night games in The Swamp or at Tiger Stadium are electric. Florida-Georgia is an experience and should never leave Jacksonville.

Rutgers at Southern Cal? Southern Cal at Maryland? My first inclination is to ask why but I know why. It’s all about the money. The Pac-12 doesn’t exist because Larry Scott and George Kliavkoff failed to make the league relevant enough that one or more networks was willing to invest in the future of the Conference of Champions.

I’m an SEC guy but I’m going to miss the Pac-12.