In a 16-page ruling, Judge Gutierrez has ruled that he has thrown out the NFL Sunday Ticket case, which is subject to appeals.
Currently, the NFL won’t have to pay a penny to any of the over 2.4 million customers who purchased NFL Sunday Ticket at a deliberately overpriced rate between June 2011 and February 2023.
The NFL’s lawyers argued that “the jury did not detail the basis for its calculations, its highly specific damages figures leave no doubt what it did.” Judge Gutierrez agreed with the NFL’s lawyers and the defense figured out the formula that the jurors used to calculate the damages that totaled almost $4.7 billion to the Residential Class.
Judge Gutierrez picked apart the testimonies of both Dr. Rascher and Dr. Zona and excluded both of their testimonies under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. In their testimonies, both Dr. Rascher and Dr. Zona provided their own “but-for worlds”, however, the judge said their methodologies were “flawed” and should be excluded from the case.
He explained that the two economic experts that the plaintiffs provided, he found the opinions of the pair to be “unreliable” and “the Court does not find that it would be unreasonable for a juror to find that there was a conspiracy that unreasonably restrained trade.”
Judge Gutierrez further explains, “But without Dr. Rascher’s and Dr. Zona’s testimonies, it is impossible for a jury to determine on a class-wide basis that Sunday Ticket subscribers would have indeed paid less in the absence of Defendants’ anticompetitive conduct. Thus, Plaintiffs failed to provide evidence from which a reasonable jury could make a finding of injury and an award of actual damages that would not be erroneous as a matter of law, be totally unfounded and/or be purely speculative.”
As mentioned previously, and up above, this ruling is subject to appeals and will go through the appellate system in the Ninth Circuit if there is an appeal.
The NFL has already put out a statement, thanking Judge Gutierrez for his ruling.
With these developments, who knows what the future of Sunday Ticket will be? What we do know is that the NFL intentionally created a product to drive up CBS and FOX’s ratings and make fans either stuck with whatever game was in their market or pay way too much for Sunday Ticket.
And the NFL has won, for now.