In a stunning twist, a federal judge has overturned a $4.7 billion verdict against the National Football League, whose broadcast model was found in a jury trial to have violated antitrust laws.
U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez granted the NFL‘s bid to void the verdict, finding that some of the testimony from experts who testified in the trial should’ve been excluded. Without that testimony, she concluded that “no reasonable jury could have found class-wide injury or damages.”
The court is expected to grant the NFL a new trial.
The 8-year-old legal battle centered on allegations that the league and its 32 teams conspired in violation of antitrust laws to allow the NFL to reach exclusive deals with broadcast partners for the right to air out-of-market games. In June, a jury agreed with fans who claimed they overpaid for Sunday Ticket. If the verdict stood, the NFL stood to lose nearly $15 billion since damages in antitrust cases can be trebled. It may have also been forced to change its broadcast model.
The court’s reasoning to overturn the verdict was grounded in testimony from Daniel Rascher and John Zona.
Rascher used college football as his model for what would happen in the absence of the broadcasting restraints at issue in the case. If NFL teams stopped “colluding and selling” their out-of-market games through the league and instead sold them independently, he opined that the result would be like the broadcast model for college football since the games would “become available, just like on Saturday, on over-the-air channels” and “basic sports cable channels.” Customers wouldn’t “pay anything extra above what they were already paying for their TV package,” he testified.
The expert calculated damages for the 11 years fans allegedly overpaid for Sunday Ticket by adding all the total payments for the offering, which equaled roughly $5.6 billion for residential customers and $1.3 billion for the commercial customers.
Gutierrez agreed with the NFL, which argued that his work is “devoid of economic reasoning and contrary both to basic economics principle and all of the trial testimony offered” by other witnesses. “Dr. Rascher’s trial testimony revealed his college football but-for world was not the product of sound economic methodology,” she wrote. The order stated that he “needed to explain how these out-of-market telecasts would have been available for free to cable and satellite customers in the but-for world.”
Zona, meanwhile, provided two models describing what the NFL’s broadcast model would look like without exclusivity. Gutierrez found that his models “irrationally predicted that consumers would pay higher prices from an alternative distributor of Sunday Ticket instead of purchasing from DirecTV” and rested on the “unsupportable assumption” that there was an alternative possible distributor, namely a streaming service, available from 2011 to 2023.
Bids to overturn jury verdicts through so-called motions for judgment as a matter of law are rarely granted, as it was in this case.
“We are grateful for today’s ruling in the Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit,” an NFL spokesperson stated. “We believe that the NFL’s media distribution model provides our fans with an array of options to follow the game they love, including local broadcasts of every single game on free over-the-air television. We thank Judge Gutierrez for his time and attention to this case and look forward to an exciting 2024 NFL season.”