Jaden Rashada sues Gators for backing out on NIL deal after he backed out on ‘Canes | Commentary

Who’s really the victim here — a marquee high school recruit and his opportunistic NIL agents and attorneys or football coach Billy Napier, the University of Florida and its stumbling, bumbling boosters who got duped like an I-Drive tourist buying an “authentic” Rolex from the street vendor in the parking lot of the outlet mall?

Rashada, the much-travelled California quarterback, and his representatives filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Napier, heavy-hitting Gator booster Hugh Hathcock and others in the now-defunct Gator Collective, claiming they defrauded him out of millions of dollars by backing out on a promised $13.85 million NIL agreement.

“Sadly, unethical and illegal tactics like this are more and more commonplace in the Wild West that is today’s college football landscape,” Rashada’s famous ambulance-chasing attorney Rusty Hardin (see Deshaun Watson) states in the lawsuit. “As the first scholar-athlete to take a stand against such egregious behavior by adults who should know better, Jaden seeks to hold Defendants accountable for their actions and to expose the unchecked abuse of power that they shamelessly wielded.”

In other words, Hardin is now portraying Rashada as some sort of noble freedom fighter who is going to battle to protect other “scholar-athletes” battling the evil college football establishment. Rashada is suddenly the poor, exploited high school kid who got taken advantage of by Napier, a multi-millionaire Gator booster and the big, bad SEC football industrial complex.

Excuse my skepticism, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for Rashada, who is suing the Gators because they backed out on a $13.85 million deal only after Rashada himself backed out on a $9.5 million deal with Miami. That’s right, Rashada is blaming the Gators for reneging on a deal after he reneged on a deal.

Welcome to the greedy, money-grubbing, money-grabbing world of “NIL” — which is a false, distorted way of saying “pay-for-play.” Players, their parents and their agents are playing one school against the other and selling themselves to the highest bidder. It should be noted that Rashada has now been tied to four schools in less than two years. He originally committed to Miami, signed with the Gators, transferred to Arizona State a few months later after the NIL deal with UF fell through and just recently transferred to Georgia.

Don’t get me wrong, the Gators and their boosters are certainly not innocent in all of this. If you ask me, they should be sued for being a bunch of buffoons and offering a high school quarterback — and not even the best high school quarterback — such an obscene amount amount of money.

It also appears as if they were blatantly breaking NCAA rules that clearly state NIL deals cannot be used as an inducement for luring recruits. The NCAA was in the process of investigating UF for the Rashada fiasco, but then put all NIL probes on hold in late February when a federal judge in Tennessee granted an injunction that prohibits the NCAA from punishing any athletes or boosters for negotiating NIL deals during the recruiting process.

And even without the presumed NCAA violations, UF still ends up looking foolish for ever getting involved in this mess to begin with and for getting played like Charlie Daniels’ fiddle by Rashada and his reps. This is what happens when a bunch of rich, emotional, pom-pom waving football donors are put in charge of negotiating NIL deals and trying to outbid their rival for marquee recruits.

According to the lawsuit, Rashada and his reps agreed to the $9.5 million NIL deal with Miami, but Florida boosters offered $11 million and then $13.85 million for Rashada to flip to the Gators. The lawsuit also claims that Napier and Gator boosters persuaded Rashada to sign with UF even though they never had any intention of living up to the exorbitant contract.

This is why universities, not their boosters and fans, should be negotiating the salaries and paying the players. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million-zillion times: College football programs asking fans and boosters to pay the salaries of their workforce is the biggest business scam since bottled water. (Note: “Evian” spelled backward is “Naive”)

As for Napier, his involvement in this whole issue seems nebulous. The lawsuit claims he assured Rashada’s father that the Gator Collective would make good on their $13.85 million offer by securing it with a “partial payment” of $1 million that never materialized. There is no documentation in the lawsuit to prove that claim, and one local attorney told me that Napier’s name was likely included in the lawsuit as an embarrassment tactic to coerce a quick financial settlement.

I’m told that Napier actually got wind of this ridiculous NIL deal for Rashada and pulled the plug on it before the Gators did something really, really stupid — like blatantly breaking NCAA rules while giving a high school quarterback an inane contract worth nearly $14 million. It was at Napier’s behest that the Gator Collective finally exercised an option in the contract to terminate the deal before Rashada actually signed with UF.

Sounds like Billy Napier is being sued not because he defrauded Jaden Rashada.

It sounds like he’s being sued because UF finally came to its senses about Jaden Rashada.

Who’s really the victim here?

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen