McNair’s attorneys seek to depose NCAA’s Emmert

President’s would-be deposition is latest dispute in former USC coach’s lawsuit.

The three-paragraph notice laid out a plan to depose NCAA President Mark Emmert.

Attorneys for former USC football assistant coach Todd McNair planned to question Emmert on Feb. 9 at an office in the 49-floor Salesforce Tower in downtown Indianapolis. The videotaped session would start at 1:30 p.m. and continue for as many days as necessary, Sundays and holidays excluded.

The deposition never happened.

“We suspect you are seeking it in order to harass President Emmert and place undue settlement pressure on the NCAA,” Kosta Stojilkovic, an attorney representing the organization, wrote in a Jan. 30 email to three of McNair’s attorneys.

The would-be deposition is the latest dispute in McNair’s long-running defamation lawsuit against the NCAA.

The case is scheduled for trial next month, nearly seven years after McNair first sued in the aftermath of a scandal over extra benefits revolving around former USC running back Reggie Bush.

But first, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Frederick Shaller will hear arguments Thursday in McNair’s motion to compel Emmert’s deposition and the NCAA’s motion for a protective order to prevent it.

The NCAA didn’t respond to a request for comment and McNair’s attorneys have been content to let their court filings speak for themselves.

In one filing, McNair’s attorneys described Emmert as “one of the NCAA employees who participated in the character assassination of Mr. McNair” and accused the executive of having “orally made false statements to members of the media … heard and read by millions of people residing around the world” about the infractions case that led to historic sanctions against USC.

At issue are Emmert’s comments to USA Today in December 2010: “Everybody looks at the Reggie Bush case and says, ‘It took them a long time.’ But they got it right, I think.”

Though Emmert became NCAA president only a month before the interview, some viewed the comments as prejudicial because McNair’s appeal was pending.

The January email from the NCAA attorney pushed back, saying Emmert was “walled off” from the infractions proceeding against USC and McNair. It noted Emmert didn’t have a case file on the matter and, as shown during discovery for McNair’s lawsuit, possessed a single nonpublic document on the case: an email giving advance notice that the report by the NCAA Committee on Infractions would be released.

“There is no evidence on the record that President Emmert had any involvement in the adjudication of the USC or McNair matters, and you have never been able to point to any evidence to the contrary,” Stojilkovic wrote in the email.

He added: “The purported statement does not come close to justifying your deposition request.”

The attorney said the plaintiffs couldn’t demonstrate Emmert has any “unique or superior knowledge” about the case that would allow his deposition.

In the motion to compel the deposition, McNair’s attorneys called Emmert’s refusal “unreasonable.”

“It is now clear that only Mr. Emmert himself can testify regarding the reasons why he said what he said, whether he exhibited reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of his statements and what he meant by his words,” the motion said.

It’s unclear how many times Emmert has been deposed while NCAA president. A Maryland judge ordered his deposition in 2014 in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the parents of Frostburg State University football player Derek Sheely, who collapsed and later died from a head injury suffered during a practice in 2011. NCAA attorneys fought Emmert’s deposition, calling it “unreasonable and unwarranted.”

The motion by McNair’s attorneys recapped years of sparring between McNair and the NCAA that included a three-year odyssey through California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal after the NCAA sought to reverse Shaller’s strongly worded denial of the organization’s motion to dismiss McNair’s suit.

The Los Angeles Times and New York Times successfully fought to unseal more than 700 pages of internal NCAA emails and other documents regarding McNair and USC, including one email from a Committee on Infractions member deriding the coach as a “lying, morally bankrupt criminal, in my view, and a hypocrite of the highest order.”

The appellate court refused to allow the NCAA to file the documents under seal and rejected the motion to dismiss, among a series of legal setbacks for the organization.

The NCAA tried to remove Shaller, a USC graduate, as the case’s judge in 2016 because of the “perception of potential judicial bias.” That brought another detour to the appellate court, where McNair’s attorneys again prevailed.

McNair hasn’t coached at the college or professional level since the Infractions Committee ruled he had engaged in unethical conduct and gave him a one-year “show-cause” order that renders a coach virtually unemployable.

The NCAA determined that Bush violated NCAA rules while playing for the Trojans from 2003 to 2005, banned USC from bowl games for two seasons and stripped the program of 30 scholarships over three years. McNair was Bush’s position coach at USC.

“The NCAA’s career-ending report was false and its findings were based on the NCAA’s deliberate falsification of evidence which was done to justify its predetermined outcome,” the motion by McNair’s attorneys said.

The NCAA has denied the claim.

‘One of the NCAA employees who participated in the character assassination of Mr. McNair.’ —Attorneys for Todd McNair, the former USC assistant, referring to NCAA President Mark Emmert in a court filing