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Jaden Rashada sues Napier (and others)
There are times when College Football ventures into the surreal. Never was that more true than on last Tuesday when news broke that former Gators commit Jaden Rashada was suing Billy Napier, Gator booster Hugh Hathcock and former Gators staff member Marcus Castro-Walker.
The crux of the lawsuit is that Rashada is claiming that Napier, Castro-Walker, and Hathcock (as well as his company, Velocity Automotive) committed fraud to get Rashada to flip from Miami to Florida in December of 2022.
The lawsuit is obviously just one side of the story. Castro-Walker is now represented by Hal Lewis and Napier stated today that “I am comfortable with my actions” so this story isn’t going away.
But what does it all mean and how may it impact Florida in the future?
Does Rashada have a case?
First, we should preface this by stating that I’m not an attorney and I don’t have a copy of either the agreement Rashada had with Miami or the agreement he had with the Gators NIL entity.
The lawsuit states that Rashada had a $9.5 million NIL deal set up with Miami and had given them his commitment. He then decided to flip to Florida for an astounding $13.85 million deal promised to him by Florida. That number was apparently codified in a contract that Rashada thought was binding, but was not.
Why do I say it was not? Because Rashada’s lawyer – Rusty Hardin, the guy who defended Roger Clemens in his steroid case – didn’t sue anyone for breach of contract. That suggests that the entity that executed the contract with Rashada had written termination language into it that allowed them to act like they did.
Thus, what Rashada’s attorneys are arguing is that Napier, Castro-Walker and Hathcock lied to him knowingly (or should have known they were lying to him) to get him to sign his National Letter of Intent, only to pull the rug out from under him after getting him to commit.
Does this argument make sense?
From a football perspective, Rashada’s argument doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
First, a coach like Napier is going to need to trust his QB and his QB will need to trust him. Having a player ticked off that he was lied to about money coming his way isn’t a good way to establish trust in a relationship. That doesn’t mean that Napier didn’t promise exactly what is spelled out in the lawsuit (Rashada alleges that Napier personally told him that a $1 million payment was on the way), but I don’t think it passes the smell test that Napier would tell him that intentionally.
The argument maybe makes a little bit more sense when we consider its accusations towards Castro-Walker. As Director of Player Engagement and NIL, Castro-Walker had a huge role to play in recruiting. If the lawsuit is to be believed, that includes facilitating NIL deals, even though that was against Florida law at the time.
Castro-Walker had to be feeling the heat at that point. The Florida staff had a decent transition recruiting class but the “bump” class that Rashada was a part of was devoid of elite talent. Rashada wasn’t quite that, but he was a QB who fans could get excited about. Still, is it really believable that Castro-Walker would negotiate a deal he didn’t think would be fulfilled? I mean, the repercussions of Rashada not being happy were eventually going to come back to Castro-Walker.
Finally, we have Hathcock. Based on tweets that the lawsuit cites, Hathcock was aware of a deal to bring Rashada to Gainesville and its logic is that proves he was aware of how much that committed him to financially. Whether that’s provable is an open question, and given the provisions in the Florida law that I cited above, it isn’t hard to believe that a booster might say “get it done” but wouldn’t know exactly what “it” is.
In each case, we come back to a fundamental issue for Rashada’s camp. None of these entities benefit by just getting Rashada signed. The only way defrauding him would make any sense is if they thought that they could lock him into a National Letter of Intent and then renegotiate to a lower number. Otherwise, they essentially set themselves up for a huge black eye when he left and gained nothing on the field.
Not exactly a red-letter day in frauding.
Does Florida have anything to worry about?
The answer to this question is: it depends.
I’ve read the entire complaint that Rashada made against Florida and after listening to several lawyers (including Gator Dave’s excellent interview here), I’m not sure there’s a lot Rashada’s camp will be able to prove. But that doesn’t mean Florida isn’t at risk.
As I stated earlier, Florida law used to say that the universities could not coordinate with outside entities to entice recruits to a school. The lawsuit is accusing Napier and Castro-Walker of exactly that. There are also NCAA implications to paying a player directly to come to your school, though I doubt the NCAA is in any position to enforce its rules given that it has recently caved about allowing schools to pay players.
The thing that jumped to mind when I read about Hathcock paying Rashada $150,000, ostensibly to reimburse Miami for monies already paid for the NIL deal that Rashada originally committed to, were taxes. There are tax implications to that much money flying around and if anything was going to get the government involved, it seems to me that it would be making sure every appropriate tax was paid.
Beyond that, the real risk to the Florida program is in the discovery process.
You don’t have to win a lawsuit to embarrass your opponent. That’s why the lawsuit’s citation of text messages from Castro-Walker and members of Florida’s Gator Collective is problematic. If folks were willing to directly text Rashada’s camp about his flip, you have to suspect that there are text messages between the staff, administration and collectives that might paint things in an even less favorable light.
That’s why I think this ends quietly, with Rashada’s camp likely getting a substantial amount of money to make this go away. Of course, that assumes that Rashada wants it to go away too, and perhaps his transfer to Georgia gives him a different set of incentives.
The $13.85 million motzo ball
Lost in all of this lawsuit drama is the massiveness of these numbers and what Florida was on the verge of promising Rashada.
Nearly $14 million is just crazy given what we know about some other deals that are out there. You could maybe justify that price to me for a guy like D.J. Lagway; someone who profiles as a can’t-miss prospect and program changer. But Rashada didn’t profile that way at the time, and he certainly doesn’t after what he’s put on film at Arizona State.
Prices are certainly inflating for players, especially QBs, in college football. But in 2022 when Florida agreed to this deal, the absolute best you could convince me a player of Rashada’s ilk was worth was around $2.5 million for a four-year career. That Florida balked on this deal at the last minute means that someone who understands how players are valued (or at least viscerally understood asset valuation) finally got a say in the process.
Of course, if the lawsuit is to be believed, Florida’s staff was facilitating NIL deals with its collective and boosters actively. That means the people in charge at the time were either not capable or not tasked with understanding how to place proper NIL valuation on prospects.
Takeaway
The Rashada saga is the football version of the drunk uncle at Christmas dinner for the Florida program and its fans. Maybe a couple of people try to argue with him. Then everyone just settles on ignoring him. But he keeps raising his voice and getting more offensive until at some point something has to be done.
That’s what this lawsuit is. It was easy enough to ignore what was going on when Rashada was at Arizona State and was trying to put the Florida drama behind him. But Rashada’s camp clearly feels lied to, and given what transpired and the money he allegedly gave up at Miami, I’m not sure that I blame them for being angry.
Yet just because Rashada’s camp is angry doesn’t mean they’re entitled to anything. Florida’s NIL entity entered into a contract that it apparently had the right to terminate and did so. Just because the Rashada camp feels bad about the situation doesn’t mean the NIL entity – or Napier, Castro-Walker or Hathcock – did anything legally wrong.
But just because they (perhaps) didn’t do anything legally wrong doesn’t mean there isn’t risk here.
In my first year working full-time, I sent an email to our IP attorney. About five seconds after I hit send, he called and instructed me that I was never to email or text him and that he would only respond to a phone call. The reasonining was that written documentation might need to be explained away and the same objective could be accomplished with a phone call.
The risk of Florida not settling quickly is that there are more texts, emails and other documentation on Florida servers that they would just rather keep out of the limelight. The example that jumps to mind is Jon Gruden’s resignation from the Raiders in 2021 after an unrelated investigation into Washington’s workplace culture surfaced disparaging emails of Gruden’s.
One would hope that there’s nothing like that lurking in the dark. But given the murkiness of college football recruiting, I can’t imagine that any program, not just Florida, would want adversaries combing through their servers.
So settle and move on. Or else we might as well get ready for the drunk uncle of college football situations to make an appearance yet again.