By Scott Salomon
What are the only five words you can ask a Gators head football coach wearing a neatly-tailored, two-button suit?
Will the Defendant please rise?
Gator head football coach Billy Napier lost the coin toss on Tuesday and it appears that the Gators will start the 2024 season playing defense.
Napier and Gator booster Hugh Hathcock along with several other defendants are being sued by former Gators quarterback signee Jaden Rashada for almost $14 million in the Northern District of Florida in Pensacola.
The Rashada case shows why NIL collectives are bad for college football. Schools make promises and write checks that their collectives cannot cash and the players are left holding something like an empty pillow case on Halloween that was supposed to be filled with candy.
The lawsuit surrounds the NIL money that the Gator NIL collective which Napier and Hathcock promised to pay Rashada to play football for the University of Florida.
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Hathcock, a 64-year-old booster, made a ginormous eight-figure donation to the football program in 2022 and was the former director of Gator Guard, a UF NIL collective that was responsible for raising money to feed student-athletes for playing sports at the University of Florida.
Rashada is suing on counts of fraudulent misrepresentation, fraudulent inducement, aiding and abetting fraud, civil conspiracy to commit fraud, negligent misrepresentations, tortious interference, aiding and abetting tortious interference, and vicarious liability.
Allegedly, the Gators offered the money to Rashada after getting him on campus after he committed to the University of Miami, who offered Rashada a $9.5 million NIL package. That report has been categorically denied by John Ruiz, the lawyer and CEO of LifeWallet who was a major donor to the University of Miami’s NIL collective.
“LifeWallet nor John H. Ruíz ever had any deal with Rashada that amounted to 9.5 million dollars. LifeWallet had a very small deal with Rashada while he was a high school student in California,” Ruiz said in a statement and on the social media platform former known as Twitter. “Rashada and his father are stand up individuals. To date, I personally have a very good relationship with both. They both know we dealt with them honestly and fairly as we have always done with all NIL players.
“… While I have my own view of this matter, at this point the interests of this young man should be the focus.”
However, the lawsuit does raise the point that Rashada and his family paid $150,000 to Ruiz after agreeing to flip to the Gators. This leads one to come to their own conclusions about the Miami offer and if it was not made by Ruiz, who offered it, and why did Ruiz get any renumeration? Apparently, a deal was in place with Ruiz and LifeWallet, but the only figure that remains unproven is how much the contract was worth.
The suit, filed by sports attorney Rusty Hardin, who has represented Warren Moon, Roger Clemens and most recently Deshaun Watson, states that Miami and Ruiz had an agreement in place with Rashada and the down payment money was returned to Ruiz and was provided by Hathcock. This was done so the quarterback could avoid litigation with Ruiz, a trial lawyer, and his company.
The lawsuit alleges that in October 2022, Hathcock and Marcus Castro-Walker, the former director of UF’s NIL collective and another Defendant in the lawsuit, reached out to Rashada’s NIL agents and said that they wanted to lock down Rashada this week and that they wanted him to flip immediately from Miami, which would be seen as a major coup in Napier’s recruiting cap.
As for Hathcock, according to the lawsuit, he allegedly promised to pay $5.35 million including a $500,000 signing bonus through Hathcock’s company Velocity Automotive, which is now defunct, but still a Defendant in the federal action.
The lawsuit states that “Hathcock, Castro-Walker, and Coach Napier all knew something that Jalen did not – no one had any intention of enforcing Hathcock’s promise to pay $500,000 and that there was no way to enforce it.”
Rashada initially signed his NLI with Florida on Early Signing Day, but later backed out of it.
“These actions culminated with Coach Napier himself vouching that UF alumni were good on their promise that Jaden would receive $1 million if he signed with UF on National Signing Day,” the complaint states. “Defendant Castro-Walker leveraged the coach’s promise that Napier would ‘get it done,’ and threatened – on National Signing Day – that, if Jaden did not sign a national letter of intent with UF, Coach Napier might walk away from Jaden entirely.
“Despite the threats and promises, neither Coach Napier nor wealthy boosters like Hathcock ever ‘got it done’ for Jaden.”
Napier allegedly told Rashada by phone that he would receive a partial payment of $1,000,000 from Hathcock immediately upon signing his National Letter of Intent. Rashada signed within an hour of Sun Belt Billy’s phone call and never saw a dime. The Hathcock circus-like, carnival act, packed up and left town with Rashada’s NLI and his money.
The Gators, through their athletic department spokesman had no response to the 37-page lawsuit that reads more like a manifesto on how not to run an NIL program and more like how to defraud a student-athlete in 50 easy steps.
“We do not comment on ongoing litigation, and neither the University Athletic Association nor the University are named in the complaint,” Florida athletic department spokesman Steve McClain told On3 regarding Rashada’s lawsuit against Napier. “The UAA will provide for Coach Napier’s personal counsel, and we will direct all questions to those representatives.”
When the kid got to campus, after signing with the Gators just after the Early National Signing Day, he arrived with empty pockets and big dreams.
The cash never showed, Hathcock played the carnival pitchman and ultimately played the Rashada family like a fiddle.
The Gators ultimately released Rashada from his National Letter of Intent shortly after it was signed.
Rashada then started his tour through the NCAA which would take him to Arizona State, where he played some as a true freshman, before battling injuries, and now to the University of Georgia where he is viewed as the quarterback in waiting for Carson Beck to graduate and go to the NFL.
Castro-Walker is no longer affiliated with the Florida program. Hathcock, a longtime Florida booster, is not involved in NIL activities and his Gator Guard collective shut down.
Oddsmakers are betting as to whether Napier makes through the 2024 season without losing his job.
The other question is which will end first? Napier’s coaching career at Florida or the federal lawsuit?
