Last updated on 10/06/2015
What’s it about this time? Duck bowl games.
In a nutshell, Duck Executive Senior Associate Athletic Director for Finance and Administration Eric Roedl – let’s just call him the DESAADFA – got hit up by some insurance salesman for a policy that would pay the Duck football coaches in the event their unpaid student-athletes won enough bowl games to trigger the lucrative bonus clauses in the coaches’ contracts:
These bonuses topped out at about $1M. Eric Roedl paid Lloyd’s of London $489,940 for the policy:
Unfortunately it seems that our DESAADFA had not read the fine print on the contract. Hey, it’s not like he was spending his own money, as Milton Friedman would have put it.
It turns out Lloyd’s was only obligated to pay the coaches if the Ducks won the BCS. If they topped out at some intermediate lesser rank, then the bonuses were UO’s problem – not a dollar from those pommie bastards at Lloyd’s.
Which, of course, is what happened:
So now UO is out the $687,965.74 in bonuses, *and* the $489,940 for the useless insurance.
So the UO General Counsel’s Office promptly sued the Athletic Department’s Eric Roedl, for not reading the contract.
Just kidding. Roedl works for the Ducks. How bad would that look? Instead we sued the insurance brokers. HLGR is now collecting its usual ~$300 an hour. As for Duck Executive Senior Associate Athletic Director for Finance and Administration Eric Roedl?
He got a raise:
2014:
2012:
And, from the looks of the lengthy PACER docket available free from RECAP here, I’m guessing HLGR ain’t doing too badly on this deal either, when it comes to billable hours.
From what I can tell this is Harrang et al’s last unfinished business for UO, unless they get the contract to defend UO and former interim GC Doug Park in state court over the Bowl of Dicks case they lost in federal court. Which would seem unlikely.
Harrang has already had to change lawyers on this once, after Joshua Stump and a bunch of other attorneys left HLGR for Buckley:
Well played Lloyds. Well played.
The Ducks were insured against WINNING? Greed and stupidity, hand in hand. This is just dumb.
Too bad we are all having to carry the loss, even if indirectly….
How is this insurance? Sounds like gambling to me.
And a 25% raise over two years?! The new talk from Schill is about how faculty have to quit kvetching about the money spent on athletics and aim to be as successful with academics as UO has been in athletics. Let’s pour this kind of cash on the faculty then! Move the decimal point and give us 25% raises, instead of numbers like 2.5. And let’s build a diamond-encrusted tutoring center for the use of thousands of students, instead of a tiny subset. And maybe we could take out one of these “insurance policies” on getting NSF grants, etc.? By all means, let’s transfer over some of the best ideas from the athletic side to the academic side. And maybe some of the cash too!