Sports Law: Claims Against Tubby Smith Dismissed
When a Hennepin County judge threw out all but one of the claims against Minnesota basketball coach Tubby Smith in the lawsuit brought by a former assistant coach, it seemed as though two worlds collided.
In one universe, we have head coaches who regularly break existing contracts to jump from one school to the next. As Dan Fitzgerald wrote recently in his comprehensive roundup of the issue on the blog Connecticut Sports Law, college football effectively has a free agent system for head coaches, in which coaches can come and go as they please.
In the other world, we have assistant coaches, who have to make life-altering decisions based on the word of head coaches. In the Smith lawsuit, former assistant coach Jimmy Williams sued because he thought Smith had offered him a job coaching the Gophers. Smith left his job at Oklahoma State and sold his Oklahoma home in what he says was reliance on Smith’s verbal statements. Smith did not get the job at Minnesota because Smith’s boss nixed the decision. The reasons for the veto remain unclear. Williams, a former Gophers player, was apparently thought to be contaminated by his association with scandal-plagued Gophers teams of the 1970s and 80s.
So college head coaches can come and go as they please. College assistant coaches have to rely on promises made by head coaches and by no means can they come and go as they please. In fact, the judge held that Williams intentionally breached his own contract when he left Oklahoma State in reliance on Smith’s alleged promise:
The judge wrote that she granted dismissal on the count of interference with contract because Williams consciously and voluntarily breached his contract with Oklahoma State. She wrote that she dismissed the claim of withdrawn promise -- a legal theory called ``promissory estoppel" -- because the Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of that identical claim against the university and Maturi on the grounds that litigating that claim would illegally intrude on the university's hiring decisions.
The only remaining claims against Smith are negligent misrepresentation and fraud. The judge was wise to strike the punitive damages claim because there does not seem to be the required element of malice for such a claim.
