As an attorney, my advice to WSU/OSU is ...
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I guess I see it in a much larger context. Sure, it is a legal question, and certainly, a competent counsel can argue the case. But this is just as much a negotiation as it is a legal dispute. And you want the other side to know you are taking no prisoners in this one. Hence the need for a gunslinger. And no west coast firm would be viewed in that light for a gunfight in the PAC corral.
Not only the remaining assets, but the upcoming assets. USC or UW go win the P12 Championship and win the Bowl Championship Series, (Rose, etc), and/or UCLA or Arizona in Basketball get to the Sweet 16, or better....the COUGS and Beavs receive and split the championship proceeds.
You will only find inner peace when you acknowledge and accept that you never have, and never will be, as good as the NY firms. Learn it. Know it. Live it.
Aren't you an attorney? Mad because they didn't pick YOUR firm?
Or just upset that WSU/OSU are going after all the greedy, self-centered, asshole schools that have ruined the PAC?*
*That means the uw, in case you are confused.
One motivation for it is lack of relationship. Any Seattle firm is likely somehow connected to UW. Portland firms to UO. San Francisco to Stanford/Cal, LA firms to USC/UCLA. An east coast firm is unlikely to have any connection to any of the conference schools, and less bias.
I haven't bothered to look at information about this firm and their specializations either, but maybe they've got a bulldog who's emphasis is sports media relationships. That could also add value.
Either way, if we can pay them a couple hundred K and they gain us 100M...money well spent.
If you thought the Pac would continue as is minus USC and UCLA, you were extremely naive. I knew Oregon and Washington were headed to the Big 10 eventually once the Trojans and Bruins left. The LA schools made that inevitable. The only thing that surprised me was the swiftness of the disintegration.
Yes, I'm mad WSU didn't hire me.
Not the biggest deal in the world, but like most national/international firms, Weil has a California office. OSU went with a Bay Area firm. Honestly, I think the case is pretty simple. I lunch regularly with some Roosevelt classmates, most of whom became UW classmates as well. We were talking about OSU and WSU succeeding to the conference's assets weeks ago. We never really regarded the issue to be in significant doubt.
Again, I agree with your comments but see this as simply the first step in a bigger process. Every action is setting the stage for the subsequent actions. The conference's assets are the current issue, but the long term damages seem likely to eventually become a legal matter...unless the 10 decide to settle, individually or collectively. The settlement aspect is what I was referring to when I used the word negotiation in a previous post. It is hard to not see it going to that extent. Particularly if it goes to discovery, when the inevitable trail of emails will paint an unflattering picture of double dealing & duplicity that led to damages to OSU and WSU.
H, I am sure there are many reasons they didn't hire you, but don't take it personally. Generally speaking, your input in this board has been cordial and I appreciate that, as a difference of opinion and view point is welcome in IMO. I do think you are missing the bigger picture, if this case was only about notice and voting rights, as you said it's pretty easy. However I think that is just step one, once they have control of the Pac 12 and whatever assets there are or aren't, you will start to see more depositions which will dig deeper and deeper into the whole past 6-10 years of negotiations. USC and UCLA blocked the addition of any team from the Big 12 a few years ago, which might have included Texas and Oklahoma, were USC and UCLA already working with the Big 10? We all know that once your largest media market leaves the conference, the next PAC 12 media contract was in trouble. Once the LA schools left, UW and Oregon have been lobbying hard with the Big 10 ever since, that's no secret. So were they trying to negotiate in good faith and work out the best deal for the pac 12? Or were they trying to set up the negotiations for failure, so they could use the " we had no choice" argument, and not look like the bad guy.
Did Fox and ESPN collude against Apple? Why didn't CBS or NBC get involved, they had open programing? There are a lot of unanswered questions, and I think by hiring this law firm their intention is to get to the bottom of everything and leave no stone unturned. A league that existed for over 100 years got wiped out in less than 2 years, a league I have followed since the 60's. I and many others would like to know how and why this happened. We won't hear it from the networks, because they are part of the problem. print media has no investigative journalist left, so they are no go. The only option you have is to spend the money on a law firm to get to the answers, and even that is not a guarantee you will find them all.
It's not Hooterville. But even my Silicon Valley firm gets "big timed" by top-5 types of firms (Cravath, Wachtell, Simpson, Skadden, etc.) by some Valley clients because ... that's just how it is. Procurement managers didn't get fired in the 60s for hiring IBM, and nobody gets fired for engaging Wachtell to run an M&A deal, even if it's entirely unnecessary. A plaintiff seeking to demonstrate it's serious can better do that with Weil than even a local Seattle shop like Perkins, DWT, and the like, much less a small firm in Spokane. It's just how it goes. I still kick ass against those partners from those top-5 firms. But I get how this works and am not too bothered by it.
Hey! You are a Cougar, and we take delight in beating the butts of the over-rated folks that are ranked ahead of us. Keep up the good work!
There have already been a lot of good comments about this, but the best one mentioned that given that many of the Pac-12 universities are "doctor/lawyer" schools, it is inherently dangerous to hire any large firm based in any of the major metros in the Pac-12 footprint to fight our fight. It's not inferiority, it's awareness.
My company is based in Arkansas and most of the C suite folks are Arkansas alums. I wouldn't trust a single one of them to be unbiased when it comes to anything Arkansas related.
If there is anything that screams "inferiority complex" in this thread, it's your pissing and moaning about WSU not hiring a Washington firm.
I agree with that the LA schools' motives were self-interested and not having an almost annual game in LA made the likelihood of retaining UW and UO very low, for reasons of their own self-interests. I also doubt Texas could have been attracted to or retained in a 16 team Pacific Southwest hybird without a sweetheart arrangement which none of the powers in the Pac could have accepted for very long, if at all.
But the differing interests of the various players have been obvious for years. Collusion would have been unnecessary, and I don't know how a damages case goes very far without a collusion intended to harm the others.
Anyway, it was always a quibble for me. Never mind the Pac-12; I miss the Pac-8. Money changes everything. Someone should really write a song about that.
I didn't even say it had to be a Washington firm.
But there are a lot of Cougars who became lawyers. Just as there are a lot of Huskies who became veterinarians.
The main guy arguing yesterday for Oregon State (and possibly lead overall) was from Keker & Van Nest, a SF firm, and went to UC Berkeley for law school, for what each is worth.
I have a Pac 8 clock, with all the mascots on it, including the Stanford Indian, and yes it still runs.
I question the value of chasing things back 10 years. The bigger questions are the resolution of voting and dissolution terms and the amount of money at stake today.
Even if we could show that USC/UCLA were maneuvering for a Big 10 invite for n 2014, it doesn’t inform todays conflict. The bylaws don’t say that’s not allowed, they didn’t violate them until they submitted notice to withdraw. Sure, it means they probably weren’t negotiating in good faith, and “knowingly and intentionally” torpedoed other mergers to benefit themselves…but how do you quantify those damages?
I think we focus on now - find legal support for seizing the media money from the 10 and eliminating their vote (which I don’t think should be that difficult). If that happens…OSU and WSU vote to seize everything. There’s our pound of flesh. 10 teams walk away with no revenue for 2023-24. WSU and OSU get a nice little nest egg to establish (or re-establish) their home for the next few years and pay some bills. Everyone goes their separate ways.
Especially Kliavkoff, who’s fired for cause the minute OSU and WSU have control.
Is it reflecting an inferiority complex when the uw insists on bringing in a 4 or 5 star HS QB from Texas instead of using a nice 3 star guy from Ballard?
Because I don't pay the slightest bit of attention to teenagers deciding where to go to college (my own kids are long out of college), I can honestly say that while this is probably a really sick burn, I have no idea why.
I don't know, I hear there's a truck parked in Ballard with a sign that reads "Mr. Haney's Super Duper Legal Services."
Glad Cougar
Kirk Schulz on why Pac-12 Presidents meeting sent alarm bells ringing
'As judge said: 10 people on one side, two on the other. Not sure what kind of cooperative discussion you're gonna have'
www.cbssports.com
Sorry the point went flying over your head. Just go back to your inference that hiring the best possible firm (happened to be from NY and not from our local hood) was somehow evidence of an inferiority complex. So I just asked if the uw bringing on a higher star rated QB from way out of state rather than settling for a local 3 star kid wasn't an inferiority complex. You know-hypocrisy and all that-why doesn't the uw settle for a perfectly competent person from the local hood instead of going for a kid with a higher reputation. You don't need to pay attention to a specific example to get it.
But good for you for not letting a 17 year old kid's decision about where to earn his payola in college not drive your own happiness.
Double H… away from the law if uw finishes no higher than third, never sniffs the playoffs, never really in a run for the title is the money worth it .
Not trying to dodge, but frankly, I'm at the "Who cares?" stage. I'm pretty disgusted by the destruction of everything that was good about college football. If I want to watch pro football, the best pro football in the world is played on Sundays (primarily). I've become increasingly less emotionally invested in college football as the bowls were diminished and unrestricted player movement increased. And yes, I'll still watch sometimes . . . for now.
Perhaps it funds the non-revenue sports, but at what cost? If the UW wasn't chasing the brass ring, presumably someone else would. But if you could go back in time, would universities even choose to be in this unwieldy business of providing sports entertainment?
The biggest question for me was raised in the discussion about Big Sky teams going to the Mountain West. I seriously wonder why any university would choose to leave the relative comfort of FCS football for "the big time". It seems like a lot of misery to me.
It is interesting … i think that is becoming universal in that people are pulling back…
REality is that for all but a few schools, all sports are non-revenue. As the money coming in has increased, the costs required to keep the money coming in has increased just as fast. This model really accelerated to the south when the system went away from the polls and tried to pick a true national champion every year. The establishment of the BCS, followed by the CFP, really allowed the explosion in commercialization and led to NLI and the ruination of football.
I stopped tracking the NFL very closely in the early 2000s, because I didn't like its increasingly mercenary nature and the way players would sandbag until a contract year and only then play to their potential (looking directly at you, Shawn Alexander). NCAA football is now even more mercenary and with less loyalty. There's less sandbagging because every year is a contract year...but instead you get kids who choose to sit out bowl games, or even regular games, to protect their draft status.
I hate that. Guess it's time to find a new hobby.
Oh, now I know who to blame on this over-tipping culture.
CF has been gutted of what has made it so great in the past. I’m losing my mo-jo for it. Seriously.
I expect that I will be out of the college football watching business within five years. I'm not going to watch Power 5 (4?) football that doesn't include WSU and the sport is devolving into a hot mess that isn't worth supporting.
Pac-12 chaos: Court documents show Washington, Oregon expected to be removed from key board discussions
Pac-12 chaos: Court documents show Washington, Oregon expected to be removed from key board discussions
The Pacific Northwest powers acknowledged they would be removed from decisions about the future of the conference.
www.mercurynews.com
I already lose track of who’s in what conference. The NFL is having a hard enough time keeping my attention when it’s a penalty to breathe on the QB. Why TF would I want to watch the lite version of that? May have to start following the English premiere league or something.
Curious take on Alexander. Seahawks let him eat for the best years of his prime, he delivered, then they paid him top dollar for what he DID. All while letting the best guard in FB and one of the reasons he was successful walk. I’m not a hawks fan just a casual observer of their dealings and that mess was 99% on the dipshits in the front office. Patriots would have let him walk after he put up all those TDs knowing full well his best days were behind him and some other stupid franchise would pay him a truckload for the downside of his career.
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