For years, the Maryland Terrapins have served as a precautionary example of how not to run a college football team. They wear atrocious uniforms, belong to a conference that years after the fact struggles to remember that they exist, and they’re objectively bad at “winning football games against people who aren’t Texas.” It’s truly telling when “on-the-field failure” is the least of a program’s problems, but that’s Maryland.
But then things took a tragic turn before the season with the death of Jordan McNair, who passed away two weeks after suffering heatstroke during a grueling practice. From the start, it appeared as though McNair’s death was preventable and that his post-incident care was suspect at best. The head coach was suspended and the university commissioned an investigation engaging, among other attorneys, DLA Piper.
Now, so far so good. This is standard operating procedure — this is what we’ve seen at Penn State and Baylor. It’s usually the institutional cover the school needs to fire people for cause and therefore sever ties without owing the coach millions of dollars in dead money. It can also serve the opposite purpose. For example, earlier this year, the Ohio State University used Mary Jo Whitewash’s fig leaf of a report to let its coach and athletic director off with a slap on the wrist for enabling domestic violence. Either way, the internal investigation report dictates how the school moves forward by covering its legal bases.
So when Maryland released an absolutely damning 192-page report that stopped just shy of using the word “toxic,” it seemed as though Maryland was gearing up to clean house and fire everyone for cause. The report didn’t exactly recommend firing head coach DJ Durkin, but it did blame him for failing to control the subordinates that were responsible in its estimation for the broken culture, so Durkin’s fate was already likely sealed.
Which is why it was so dumbfounding when the school reinstated head coach DJ Durkin, reportedly over the objections of the university’s president. The Board also reportedly wanted to retain the strength coaches directly involved in the practice that led to McNair’s death! It’s one thing to mortgage your soul for Joe Paterno, but Maryland was ready to sweep it all under the rug for a 5-13 conference record. Not that either case is acceptable, but at least you can see why the former gave some people some pause, you know?
But let’s take a second to underscore exactly how stupid this was from a legal standpoint. The Board held in its hands a report that would allow them to turn the page on a culture that — quite likely — contributed to killing someone and move on from a mostly disastrous coach for free all at the same time and they didn’t take it. That would be bad enough, but in so doing, they set the bar for “cause” having to be “at least something worse than this report” which would more or less require Maryland’s locker room being the set of a Hostel movie.
And yet that’s still not the end of the mismanagement because after players walked out on the reinstated coach and Maryland’s governor spoke out, the school fired Durkin without cause meaning they’re now exactly where they would have been a day ago… except owing millions of dollars.
How Filevine’s New DraftAI Cuts Out Hours Of Writing Work
Now it transforms your document creation with natural language prompts.
Michael McCann lays it all out:
By firing Durkin without cause, the termination provision of Durkin’s contract kicks in. It obligates Maryland to pay Durkin liquidated damages equal to 65% of the remainder of his contract. Durkin was scheduled to be paid $7.8 million from 2019 to ’21 and is also owed compensation for the last two months of ’18. Applying these data points, the university will pay Durkin about $5.1 million.
Unbelievable. It’s like the old saying, “When DLA Piper opens a door, Maryland runs head first into a wall stud” or something like that.
Worse for the school, as McCann points out, there’s an outside chance that Durkin could mount some likely unsuccessful defamation-style claims, but they’ve also guaranteed that they will have an adversarial relationship with him when McNair’s family ultimately pursues its wrongful death suit. On the one hand, Maryland can posture itself as having distanced the program from the old guard, but if they were going to pay millions anyway, they could have just kept him on administrative leave “pending the resolution of this matter.” Literally, at every single turn of this, Maryland has screwed it up.
A student is dead. Whether or not the head coach is directly responsible, the disturbing revelations of the report proved it was time to pull the plug and start over with a new regime that can redouble Maryland’s efforts to protect its students.
It may be time for the Board of Regents to consider cleaning house on the legal team side too.
The Legal Implications of Maryland’s Roundabout Firing of DJ Durkin [Sports Illustrated]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.