The NFL officially filed a motion for judgment in the Sunday Ticket lawsuit, asking Judge Philip Gutierrez to either overturn the jury’s award of $4.7 billion or grant the league a new trial.
In the NFL’s motion, the league calls the jury’s ruling “nonsensical” and “among the least defensible” in American history.
The league claims the jury calculated the award as “the sum total of discounts that class members received.”
The verdict in this case is at once among the largest in American history and also among the least defensible. The damages award is nonsensical: It represents the sum total of discounts that class members received—a number hastily calculated by a jury that quickly rejected Plaintiffs’ models. And the case Plaintiffs presented that led to the verdict focused on belated, invented-for-trial claims supported only by contortions of inadmissible evidence. None of this is appropriate, and the Court’s intervention is needed now.
The NFL continues to detail its objections to the award and the methodology used by the jury. Specifically, the league says the jury “calculated an “overcharge” for a twelve-year period based on the difference between the list price of Sunday Ticket Basic in just 2018 and 2019 ($294.00) and the average actual price paid by residential subscribers over the whole class period ($102.74). Having mistaken a discount for an overcharge, the jury then multiplied that “overcharge” ($191.26) by the numbers of residential and commercial subscribers displayed during Plaintiffs’ closing.”
The league says this methodology is “made-up” and “makes no sense.”
In its motion, the NFL says the Plaintiffs “were improperly allowed to reinvent their case” on the trial’s opening day. Their “price-fixing theory” swerved the league, and “permits leaving in place the pooling of out-of-market telecast rights and the NFL’s exclusive agreement with DirecTV—the specific conduct Plaintiffs told court after court they were challenging for the decade prior to trial, and that Defendants spent that decade preparing to defend.”
Later in the motion, the league also says the calculations by the jury “do not track any cogent theory of liability or damages,” “are impermissible speculation and guesswork, and “there is no rational connection between the damages awarded and the underlying evidence.”
Additionally, the NFL notes that Juror 7 (the foreperson) “had an improper financial stake in the outcome of the litigation” and was allowed to continue as a juror. Specifically, Juror 7 paid for the Sunday Ticket subscription of a household member, who was not a member of the Plaintiffs’ class.
Another hearing is scheduled for July 31.
[Reuters]