Billy Napier finally broke his silence about the Jaden Rashada lawsuit yesterday. He had to, because he was in front of microphones at the SEC spring meetings in Destin.
As I expected, he no-commented on the topic. Both Napier and a UF representative cited a policy against speaking about ongoing litigation, though Napier did say he’s “comfortable with my actions”.
I’m not a lawyer and nothing here is legal advice, but it’s my understanding that it’s generally best not to say anything publicly when you’re named in a legal procedure. You can’t get cornered by your own statement when you don’t make any statements.
Anyway, this suit as brought has confirmed something major I was thinking about the Rashada mess and refuted something major.
The thing it confirmed is that things got out of control with Rashada because there were some folks on the Gator side of the equation who really wanted to get back at Miami. Hurricane megabooster John Ruiz was very vocal about throwing a lot of NIL money around in 2022, and it helped UM at Florida’s expense a few times that year.
Rashada was the big one, as he had been all set to commit to UF in summer of ’22 until Ruiz helped deliver a big deal to get him to go with Miami instead. Other examples include the April commitment of Maryland transfer DT Darrell Jackson and then the commitment of 5-star CB Cormani McClain in October.
It all turned out to be easy-come-easy-go: Jackson transferred to FSU after the ’22 season, McClain okay-doke’d Miami by flipping to Deion and Colorado, and Ruiz is in significant financial trouble thanks to his company LifeWallet collapsing in market cap and being under investigation from the DOJ and the SEC (not Greg Sankey, the other one). At the time, though, John Ruiz was enemy No. 1 for the most enthusiastic Gator fans, and getting the best of him somehow was priority 1 for some well placed people.
There is a text message in the suit where then-Gator Collective CEO Eddie Rojas says, “We are going to have to dodge the freaks in Miami[.] I hate Miami. This is going to be fun to watch”. This is on top of Florida megabooster Hugh Hathcock making boastful public social media posts shortly before Rashada’s flip from Miami to Florida. It really mattered to these people.
It didn’t matter enough to have good process, which is why everything broke the way it did. The Gator Collective offered an absurd contract, Hathcock refused to fund said absurd contract, Rashada got out of his NLI, and now we’re here with a lawsuit. But it seemed at the time that Hathcock was in an, um, NIL-measuring contest with Ruiz, and Rojas was too eager to play along.
The major thing that I was wrong about is on the institutional side. I have been working from the assumption since before the Rashada fiasco that Florida’s NIL situation was a mess because no one at UF was getting involved in it. Florida as an institution likes to present itself as a rule-follower, and the NCAA rules at the time said no one on the official payroll could get involved with NIL.
Therefore, I thought, Florida’s NIL was up to the leadership of a well meaning but under-skilled former baseball player Rojas leading the Collective. NIL was a wild west at the time, but it turns out that Rojas just didn’t have the business and organizational skills to do a good job with it regardless. And because there wasn’t strong leadership at the Gator Collective, it left room for a big moneyed individual like Hathcock to try to fill some of the void and start his own collective (the Gator Guard, intended for the $1 million and up crowd if I remember correctly).
Not so. Then-Florida director of NIL Marcus Castro-Walker is a prominent figure in the lawsuit, and text message evidence shows him participating in the haggling over Rashada’s NIL deal. Those actions were prohibited by NCAA rules at the time, but it’s highly unlikely anything will come of that now. The lawsuit against the NCAA originally brought by the attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia resulted in an injunction against the enforcement of any rules barring NIL as pay-for-play. The reason? The judge thought such rules are “likely” against federal antitrust laws. So yeah: Florida’s just fine here.
However, it is an indictment of the early Napier-era operation that A) they were breaking the rules in such a flagrant way as to leave a paper trail, B) the Rashada saga still happened the way it did, and C) it took until February of this year for UF to fire Castro-Walker. No one comes out of this smelling like roses.
Andy Staples said from the beginning that he thinks the Rashada lawsuit was designed to elicit a settlement. One reason is that it names Hathcock’s former business, which he has since sold. The new owners probably don’t want to have to deal with all this. The suit also doesn’t challenge anything in the contract that Rashada had with the Collective, as doing so would’ve triggered arbitration. Arbitration happens behind closed doors, and Rashada and his lawyer apparently want this to be very public.
I would add that putting Napier in the suit is also probably settlement bait. There’s nothing in the evidence presented that nails him to the wall. Rashada’s father alleges Napier said some fraudulent things, but there is no call recording or transcript. There are no texts or emails from Napier. Some of Castro-Walker’s messages claim to have things that Napier said to pass on, but anyone can say anything in a text.
Napier, and those who employ him, will want to avoid the discovery process. If the suit isn’t settled before discovery, then the plaintiffs will be able to comb through a lot of communications that they don’t have access to right now involving those named in the suit. Even if there still isn’t anything that conclusively damns Napier, there still could be stuff that ends up admissible that is embarrassing to him either in substance or out of context.
When big institutions are sued, a very common outcome is a settlement with no admission of guilt. UF and the UAA are not actually named — On3’s Pete Nakos reported that they were left off due to sovereign immunity issues — but they’re still intimately associated with it. A settlement that results in Florida-associated parties paying Georgia’s backup quarterback won’t look good, but it’s hard to see how discovery wouldn’t be worse.
Again, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t dispense legal advice. There’s no way to make any of this quiet again, but making it go away ASAP so it doesn’t hang over the season is probably the best move.