An appeals court puts the NFL back on the hook in the Sunday Ticket case

A federal appeals court on Friday revived the jury verdict that found the NFL broke antitrust law with its Sunday Ticket package. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Los Angeles to reinstate the liability finding and hold a new trial on damages.

A jury in June 2024 found the league liable and awarded $4.7 billion to about 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses who bought Sunday Ticket on DirecTV from 2011 through 2022. A month later, U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez threw the verdict out, ruling that testimony from the subscribers' two expert witnesses should have been excluded.

The three-judge panel said he got that wrong. "Opinions are neither unfounded nor unreliable merely because they are impeachable," Judge Anthony D. Johnstone wrote. "Such opinions are for the jury to weigh at trial."

The money is another matter. The panel also found the jury ignored instructions when it set damages and came up with its own numbers based on guesswork. So the $4.7 billion is not coming back as is. A new jury will decide what the NFL owes, and because antitrust damages can be tripled, the original award could have topped $14 billion.

The NFL's response was the same defense it has used for a decade. The league said in a statement that its model, with every local game on free TV plus national windows, RedZone, Sunday Ticket and NFL Plus, is "by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports." Attorneys on both sides said they are weighing their options.

Here is the RANT take. Anyone who paid DirecTV every fall to watch an out-of-market team knows what this case was about. The league sold one package through one satellite company at one high price, and a jury of eight people decided that was illegal. A judge erasing that verdict over expert methodology never sat right, and now an appeals court agrees the jury's call should stand.

This case started in 2015 with a San Francisco sports bar called the Mucky Duck. Sunday Ticket has lived on YouTube since 2023, but the bill for the DirecTV years may still be coming.

What to watch: Whether the NFL asks the full 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court to step in, or starts talking settlement before a new damages jury is seated.