Attorneys for ex-USC assistant push back

Nearly a decade after McNair sued NCAA for defamation, the legal fight continues.

Eight and a half years after Todd McNair sued the NCAA for defamation, the former USC assistant football coach’s legal fight against the organization isn’t over.

Attorneys for McNair pushed back in a court filing last week against the NCAA’s appeal of an order granting a new trial.

“Nothing the NCAA argues comes close to undermining the new trial order on either (let alone both) of the independent grounds supporting that order,” said the 71-page response in California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal.

The latest chapter in the saga started in May 2018 when a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found that the NCAA had not defamed McNair in the investigation into the scandal involving former USC running back Reggie Bush.

In June 2010, the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions found that McNair had engaged in unethical conduct in connection with Bush, an AllAmerican running back, receiving extra benefits from sports marketers while playing for the Trojans.

Judge Frederick Shaller granted McNair’s motion for a new trial last January. He found the jury didn’t have sufficient evidence to support its finding and that the jury foreman, an attorney whose firm did appellate work for the NCAA earlier in the case, should have been disqualified.

Shaller previously found that the NCAA’s one-year show-cause punishment against McNair violated state law, and he declared the bylaws supporting the penalty void because they were an “unlawful restraint” on pursuing a lawful profession.

The NCAA appealed both decisions — sending the case to the appellate court for the fourth time.

Much of the response by McNair’s attorneys focuses on the jury not making it past the third of nine questions on the verdict form last year: whether statements two NCAA committees made about the coach were false. In granting the new trial, Shaller argued that the report by the infractions committee that sanctioned McNair in June 2010 was false “in several material ways,” particularly in regard to the description of an alleged phone conversation between Lloyd Lake, a sports marketer linked to Bush, and McNair.

“Finally,” the response continued, “the Court found McNair ‘to be a credible witness and that his denial of knowledge about Lake’s payoffs to Bush was not credibly rebutted or impeached.’ ”