After the disastrous 2012 football season, the University of Tennessee set aside $7.97 million for severance payments to Vols coach Derek Dooley and his staff.
Compared to what it cost to sever ties with Dooley, UT’s recent agreement to pay $2.48 million to settle a Title IX lawsuit rooted in the alleged mishandling of sexual assault cases involving athletes looks like a bargain.
Let’s be clear here: In no way am I putting the buyout of a bad football coach and his staff in the same category with allegations of sexual assault and faulty university procedures. The former was a reign of error. The latter, if true, was a life-changing event for several women.
The point here is that the Title IX lawsuit, like Dooley’s exit, continues UT’s habit of writing big checks to make bad things go away, particularly when it pertains to athletics. The university pays off football coaches, basketball coaches, athletics directors, female athletics department employees and on and on.
In short, this is business as usual at UT.
Think of the latest settlement as hush money of a different kind. For $2.48 million, UT puts a stop to much of the negative rhetoric about a supposed environment within the athletics department that led to sexual assaults. As long as the lawsuit was ongoing, UT would be the target of continued criticism in the court of public opinion.
Personally, I thought all along UT should have ignored the public relations hits and fought the lawsuit to the bitter end – assuming university officials and legal representation believed the school was not guilty of the charges, as they had stated.
I’ll admit, mine was a bit of a Pollyanna stance. I wanted UT to draw a line and stand its ground, defending its culture and its leadership. If the university truly had done nothing wrong, why not take it to court and fight the good fight? It was the right thing to do.
Silly me. In the modern world of litigation, you weigh all the risks – financial and otherwise – and let the bean-counters make the call. If the risks outweigh the potential reward, then you write the check.
And the university has been writing a lot of checks over the last several years.
As of June 8, UT had paid $220,862.82 to the Nashville law firm Neal & Harwell for legal fees and other expenses. The meter started running when the lawsuit was filed on Feb. 24.
In the news release that announced the settlement, UT officials noted that the cost to litigate the case all the way to trial in 2018 and any appeal that might follow could have cost as much as $5.5 million.
There are other factors at work here. Last January, Florida State reached a settlement of $950,000 with the former student who alleged then-Seminoles quarterback Jameis Winston had raped her in 2012.
At the time of the settlement, Florida State president John Thrasher said the school agreed to the settlement in order to avoid additional legal expenses.
“With all the economic demands we face, at some point it doesn’t make sense to continue even though we are convinced we would have prevailed,” Thrasher said.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a very telling comment.
In July 2014, a female athlete at UConn received $900,000 after she alleged she was kicked off the team after reporting she was raped by a hockey player.
And last fall, Oregon paid $800,000 to settle a high-profile lawsuit brought by a student who said she was sexually assaulted by three basketball players.
Perhaps those three cases serve as a template for similar lawsuits around the country. There, one accuser got $950,000, another $900,000 and another $800,000 – minus legal expenses – to settle.
Considering that the UT case had eight plaintiffs, maybe the Vols got a deal. Since the settlement figure includes legal expenses that could run as high as 40 percent, each plaintiff in the UT case would receive about $186,000, assuming things are divided equally.
I guess this is just how litigation works these days. UT officials ran the numbers, consulted the plaintiffs’ representatives and found common ground.
Based on terms of the settlement, UT didn’t lose since there is no admission of “guilt, negligence or unlawful acts.”
UT paid a seven-figure settlement. The plaintiffs got far less than they might have received if they prevailed in court. So who won? The lawyers, of course.
UT did receive a slight public relations bump in the process. The joint statement announcing the deal included the comment that the plaintiffs were “satisfied that, while universities everywhere struggle with these issues, the University of Tennessee has made significant progress in the way they educate the response to sexual assault cases.”
This pat on the back came after some extremely critical and imbalanced reporting that smacked of an unprofessional relationship between the plaintiffs’ attorneys and some in the media.
As part of the settlement, UT also must allocate $700,000 this year to create six new positions in its Title IX office.
By far, the biggest benefit to UT is that this case is closed. Football coach Butch Jones and others won’t be deposed or called to testify in open court. Everyone can move on.
And so it goes. A few months ago, Jones said the lawsuit was being used against UT in recruiting. It wasn’t lost on those close to the matter that two days before the settlement was announced, coveted wide receiver recruit Tee Higgins of Oak Ridge made a public verbal commitment to Clemson, picking the Tigers over the Vols.
Might Higgins have chosen differently if the case had been settled earlier? Like much of recruiting, that is a subject for speculation.
Now, what we are left with is the collateral damage left by a high-profile lawsuit that will not go to court.
The check is in the mail.
Reach David Climer at [email protected] and on Twitter @DavidClimer.