Interesting Thread on Land Thieves

This is very true. I still think the biggest issue for them is the GOR. But if the whole thing falls apart and several of the teams decide it is time to leave then who exactly is left to enforce it? I could see our northern neighbors keep pushing hot-button votes to stir the pot enough that more than half the league starts looking for the exists.

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they don't have nearly the concentrated internet presence anywhere such as we had on TexAgs at the time, nor the hive-mind psychology or extremism we have.

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Our true strength

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Our true strength

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It definitely is. I say that in praise of us.

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Would the GOR stand up in court?

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GORs aren't just a college sports thing. Hollywood and the record industry uses them and they have been shown to hold up in courts in those cases.

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I know Rutgers settled when they went to the B1G, but I doubt the Big XII would be willing to budge.

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Neither Rutgers nor Maryland was under a GOR when they left. The ACC had a "crazy" $50 million buyout that got negotiated down, but we have never seen someone break a GOR so we don't know how much it would cost and if its even possible to reduce that amount.

The problem with the old "exit fee" system is the conference had no leverage. No matter what the exit fee was, the only way the conference had to collect it was by withholding conference revenue from that program. That is why us and Mizzou settled for basically what they held from us instead of the full amount. They had no leverage.

A GOR is different, as your old conference has ALL the leverage. There is no way the content distributor (IE ESPN) are going to use your rights until it is clear the new conference owns them, and there is no leverage to force the old conference to give up those rights for pennies on the dollar outside of maybe wanting to move past the issue.

And that is OU's real problem- not the GOR but a program like Baylor. Baylor threatened to sue the SEC when we left and we didn't even have a GOR. Imagine if they had that GOR leverage AND they have the desperation of just firing the guy who was paying their stadium mortgage. They will fight for every penny, and OU won't be able to indemnify a conference against all potential GOR damages (which could total over $100 million).

Really nothing is changed recently. OU is just as screwed now as they were two years ago, just now they finally realize it and we are in the offseason so people are giving them a microphone. The Big 12 will concede enough where they can to the OU administrators to make them happy for now (ie Mayfield), and their fans will have to suck lemons until the GOR only has a couple of years left (and therefore can be reasonably bought out).

In other industries? Sure.

I mean a GOR is like any other contract, it comes down to how well the contract was written and how well it can be enforced, which creates the real problem for OU. Frank The Tank had a great writeup on the Big 12 GOR a few years ago:

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What’s most instructive about the GOR contract is what it doesn’t say. There isn’t a termination provision. There isn’t a liquidated damages clause. There isn’t any mechanism to calculate potential damages for a member leaving early. In fact, there isn’t any procedure at all about what would occur in the event that a member leaves the conference other than a couple of flat statements that the GOR is in effect for such member until 2025 no matter what. The Grant of Rights agreement is intentionally ambiguous.

As someone that served some hard time in the slammer of a large corporate law firm, fighting over ambiguous contracts can rack up mountains of billable hours more than virtually any other type of litigation. When you have a 200-page contract that covers every single scenario possible, that document might have been complex to draft but it’s usually a fairly straight-forward process in terms of applying it. However, when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, as there are in the GOR agreement, and it’s covered by a 4-page contract that is a simple grant without any termination or dispute resolution procedures, that in and of itself is a massive deterrent to anyone challenging the agreement. It’s almost impossible to determine the legal and financial exposure that a school that is contemplating leaving a GOR arrangement would have. There could be no exposure at all or it could be a large enough amount to literally bankrupt a school, and there’s very low confidence in assessing what’s more likely. In contrast, a school dealing with an exit fee understands its exposure immediately and can balance whether the worst case scenario (i.e. Maryland having to pay the full amount of its $50 million exit fee to the ACC) is still worth risking a defection over....

Regardless, most lawyers could probably think of numerous ways to break a GOR arrangement on paper, but the practical problem is that none of them are high confidence lines of attack. As a result, a school that attempts to break a GOR would be heading into a situation where there is unknown and unlimited legal and financial exposure, which is a horrible position to be in. For every argument out there that there aren’t any damages to conference that suffers a defection, there’s a counterargument that such conference is entitled to the fair market value of all of the TV rights for the school that’s leaving. That FMV for a marquee program like Texas could easily run into the hundreds of millions of dollars (remember that ESPN is paying Texas an average of $15 million per year for its leftover third tier rights for the Longhorn Network, much less its top football and basketball games), which eliminates any financial incentive to leave no matter how much a new conference might be promising in terms of more revenue. You don’t want to jump into a lawsuit in those types of circumstances, especially with the amount of dollars that are involved in connection with power conference media deals. The proof is in the pudding with the amount of weight that the conference commissioners have assigned to these GOR agreements and the fact that similar arrangements are enforced in entertainment industry all of the time. Believe me – when Disney bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009, the Mickey Mouse conglomerate (which also happens to be the primary beneficiary of these GOR contracts via ESPN) employed armies of lawyers to try to figure out how to get out of all the long-term or even perpetual licenses that the comic book company granted to other competing movie studios when it was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1980s and 1990s and they came up empty. Thus, Sony (via Columbia Pictures) continues to have the movie rights to Spider-Man* and Fox has the full suite of X-Men characters at its disposal despite Disney having paid $4 billion for Marvel....

So, the GOR’s strength isn’t that it’s an ironclad complex agreement that doesn’t include any loopholes. Instead, it’s an arrangement that is a triple-dog-dare to schools that want to attempt to challenge it since there isn’t any reliable precedent about how to calculate damages. This is proverbial Russian roulette in a practical legal context – the damages could be more than you could imagine… or they could be less than what a normal exit fee would have been. That makes it a great moot court exercise for people like me and other writers in the peanut gallery, but a dangerous contract to challenge in real life.

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LINK

tl:dr- OU is screwed

I haven't read the actual GOR, but I imagine that it would have a provision in it specifically waiving sovereign immunity.

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Could a state school play the sovereign immunity card?

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No because that wouldn't change the fact that the Big 12 still owns the rights. Sovereign immunity means OU maybe can't be sued for leaving, but without their TV rights they are worthless.

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I haven't read the actual GOR,

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Here it is, only a couple of pages. Its an easy read:

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