Judge allowed Sunday Ticket experts to testify, and then threw out their testimony after the verdict

Civil trials can have two kinds of witnesses: (1) fact witnesses, who talk about events relevant to the controversy; and (2) expert witnesses, who offer relevant opinions based on their education, training, and experience.

The plaintiffs in the Sunday Ticket class action had their $4.7 billion verdict (and $14.1 billion judgment) thrown out on Thursday because Judge Philip Gutierrez decided the opinions provided by the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses regarding financial damages were not reliable.

That’s what happened, in the simplest possible nutshell. The judge, who knew what the experts would say and allowed them to say it, threw out the expert testimony after the jury issued its verdict.

So why let them testify in the first place? Why waste everyone’s time (including the jury’s) by conducting a four-week trial if the judge believed the opinions of the expert witnesses were insufficient?

The challenge in any antitrust case is to take the real-world expenses arising from antitrust violations and conjure a hypothetical world in which the antitrust violations didn’t happen. It’s not going to be easy to do, especially when (as in this case) the NFL didn’t offer its own but-for world but instead fought aggressively against anything/everything the plaintiffs suggested.

Dr. Daniel Rascher, one of the expert witnesses whose testimony was allowed until it wasn’t, crafted a model based on the NFL ditching Sunday Ticket and selling the out-of-market games to various networks that would broadcast the feeds from CBS and Fox.

It’s a simple concept. In each market, CBS and Fox would deliver the games that they always have. Steelers in Pittsburgh. Packers in Milwaukee. Falcons in Atlanta. Dolphins in Miami. Etc. Etc. Then, in each market, the other games would be delivered through a collection of networks and/or cable channels — NBC, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, FS1, USA, NFL Network, and/or TNT.

The end result could have taken that form, or others. Ultimately, it would have been up to the NFL…

Source link : https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-allowed-sunday-ticket-experts-010626645.html

Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports

Publish date : 2024-08-03 01:06:26

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