NFL Sunday Ticket case takes surprising turn

The NFL has been confident that the $4.7 billion verdict in the ongoing Sunday Ticket trial would be overturned in their appeal, And it turns out, they may be correct in that assessment.

If the verdict were to stand, the NFL could be liable for as much as $14.1 billion under federal laws that can triple the amount won in antitrust cases. But on Wednesday, Judge Philip Gutierrez highly indicated that he plans on overturning the verdict.

While Gutierrez didn’t issue a ruling during Wednesday’s hearing on the NFL’s motion to have the verdict thrown out as the league had hoped, he did heavily hint that he agrees with the league’s sentiment that the verdict was not awarded based on the evidence presented at trial.

“There’s no doubt about what they did,” Gutierrez said about the jurists via the Courthouse News Service . “They didn’t follow the instructions.”

Gutierrez went on to further question how the jury came to their $4.7 billion ruling in a question directed to plaintiff attorney Mark Seltzer.

“Is it rational to say the damages are the discounts?” Gutierrez asked Seltzer. “It’s not even a discount that applies to this case. That’s even more irrational.”

The question that now remains is whether Judge Gutierrez will end up siding with the NFL and reducing the damages owed, or potentially order for a new trial.

Regardless, either decision from Gutierrez is set to have major ramifications for both NFL owners and players.

Players earn a 50/50 split of TV revenue with the current collective bargaining agreement. And with this in mind, league owners have questioned whether they can make back the potential money lost in this lawsuit by eating into the league salary cap growth for years to come, which most recently grew by 13.4 percent in 2024.

This is a possibility that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones sees as quite likely should the damages remain, saying last week that he believes he “knows better than anybody of what the cap will be four years from now.”

[ Courthouse News Service ]

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