By a former WR who said that they mismanaged his injury and cost him his NFL career.
Yikes!
http://footballscoop.com/news/new-lawsuit-filed-gary-patterson-tcu-every-coachs-attention/
If he had long term health issues that weren’t being taken care of by TCU, I’d be on his side. This lawsuit however is ridiculous. His “breakout” junior year was 4 TDs and was projected to go in the 6th round of the draft before his injury. That earns him one year of practice squad money at the best.
I doubt this lawsuit goes anywhere.
However, it does remind me of the Craig and Adam James accusations against Mike Leach at Texas Tech.
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I wouldn’t be so quick to discount this case.
It’s true that the dude has a shaky/speculative damage model for future earnings. But he has fantastic liability facts, if true. And he has sued for other damages besides future earnings.
I’ve seen people get millions of dollars for a lot less.
The plaintiff’s lawyer isn’t a schmuck, either.
TCU should be quite worried about this case. The PR is going to be… unfavorable. What Patterson allegedly did to that kid is unconscionable.
This looks a bit different from the Leach case. With Leach he might have been verbally chastising the player but he was also requiring him to go through concussion therapy…And James faked video to make Leach look bad.
According to the TCU lawsuit this kid should have not played with his injury for 8 to 12 weeks to recover fully and real damage was done to his pelvic area due to him being pressured into receiving corticosteroids & pain injections then being told to play through the pain.
“54. The continuous injections numbed Kolby’s pain in his pelvic area allowing him to practice with the team and take the field each Saturday for games. Without his knowledge, the injections, specifically the corticofaksteroids, were deteriorating Kolby’s cartilage, muscles, and the entire infrastructure of his pelvis.“
…
“.68. Kolby was never able to play in the NFL due to his pelvic instability. In December 2016, Kolby underwent surgery to repair his pubic symphysis. A metal plate was placed in the area to fuse his pelvic bones together. Kolby also had repairs made to his previous hernias.”
I think there’s a case here too. Especially if they can prove they knew about the possible reprecussions of the injections and bringing him back too soon. If those can be proven I hope he gets all the money he can because they potentially ruined his life.
But it’s also a great lesson for the rest of the real world… Be as loyal to a company as they would be to you. Meaning typically you should always be willing to ruin management’s life for your benefit, because they’ll ruin yours for an extra win, dollar, credit, etc. in a heartbeat.
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We will see. Remember they had at least 4 hardcore drug dealers on their team at one point with a police investigation into the school and program. Over half the team was on drugs with absolutely no control from the coaches or administration. That blew over in a couple weeks. Patterson even got praise for kicking the 4 players off the team (they were going to prison!). About that time was when Patterson gave his drugged out star QB a third chance after more arrests and incidents with no suspension.
TCU isn’t quite at the Baylor level, but they are getting there. The program is really dirty.
Drug dealing kids and such isn’t as big a real PR hit. Ruining kids nfl prospects that will look quite a bit worse.
There is certainly a case here, but it’s not for lost wages at the NFL level. Even if a jury were to award lost wages, there’s no way something that speculative would hold up on appeal. Not only would he have to prove he would have made it in the NFL (beyond just signing a rookie contract), but also how much he would have been paid and how long he would have played. There’s no way to establish that with any reasonable certainty.
But he has to go after the lost wages because Texas has a pretty severe cap on exemplary/punitive damages. If you prove the requisite fraud, malice or gross negligence, punitive damages are limited to the greater of $200,000, or two times economic damages + non-economic damages, but not to exceed $750,000.
But, I tend to agree with the others that think this would be really bad PR, especially from a recruiting standpoint. What kid–or better yet, what parent is going to be ok with their kid going to play for a man that treats his athletes this way? That’s why I think TCU will settle this with no admission of liability and a non-disclosure gag for Listenbee. We’ll see.
One more thing, I quickly skimmed the lawsuit and can’t figure out why he named the Big 12 conference. How in the world would they be responsible for any of this? He claims the conference lacked policies to protect the health of athletes, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the job of the conference.
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At 1st I thought the same thing but what I know about Gary Patterson makes me think it goes to the bitter end.
Considering how many concussions our players had under Herman we may be happy he did not stay.
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