Appeals court makes right call in Baldwin discrimination case

Written by Dan McDonald Thursday, 02 July 2009 22:23

ULL News

Credit Louisiana’s 1st Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge with a rarity – a legal judgment in the sports world that makes sense.

Now, if common sense prevails in whatever forum former UL football coach Jerry Baldwin now takes his discrimination case, the state and the university stands to be cleansed of one of its uglier legal chapters.

On Wednesday, the circuit court threw out a $2 million judgment that a 19th Judicial District Court jury – one that proved its ignorance of the workings of collegiate athletics – had awarded Baldwin in 2007. In that case, Baldwin claimed racial discrimination by the university, the UL Board of Supervisors and former athletic director Nelson Schexnayder for his firing after the Ragin’ Cajuns’ 2001 season.

At the trial, Baldwin claimed breach of contract, discrimination and emotional distress, and the racially-balanced jury – six white, six black – voted 10-2 to award Baldwin $500,000 for general damages and emotional distress, $600,000 for lost wages and $900,000 for future lost wages.

Those numbers were shocking at the time, mostly because the jury ignored the only numbers that should have mattered – six and 27.

The six were the wins that UL had in three seasons under Baldwin – two over Division I-AA teams (Baldwin’s I-A Cajuns went 2-3 against I-AA teams in his tenure, two over a struggling UL Monroe program and wins over Idaho and Middle Tennessee. The combined record of the four I-A teams Baldwin beat was 7-37.

The 27? Well, those were the losses in three years. They included defeats at the hands of three I-AA teams in the same season – Sam Houston State, Northwestern State and Jacksonville State – in 2000. The Cajuns also lost by scores of 45-0, 44-0 and 48-0 all in the same season in 1999.

And it’s not like UL was playing a powerhouse schedule during that three-year stretch. At least in 1999, Baldwin inherited a first-season schedule that ranked in the top 100 – 95th, to be exact. The next two years the schedules got easier, with the slate ranking among the nation’s easiest at 125th in 2000 and 114th in 2001. A grand total of two I-A schools in the country played easier schedules over those three years.

During Baldwin’s first season, the university made a huge push to create interest, rally support and sell tickets, and an average of 15,289 attended home games. That average slipped by around a thousand each of the next two years and was down to 13,323 in 2001 – announced crowds, that is. Actual attendance, although undocumented, was likely the second-lowest in the school’s history.

In a way, Baldwin and the UL program were lucky. Had the current APR rules been in effect at the time, those that track student-athlete retention, the school would still be trying to pull itself out of a nearly bottomless hole.

More telling even than the numbers, though, was the emotional depths into which the program had sunk. The community was divided between those that were upset with the program’s status and those that didn’t care, with true supporters hard to come by.

Even among supporters, many felt that Baldwin was not ready to be a major-college head football coach. He had been an assistant at LSU – not a coordinator, which was supposedly one of the requirements in a candidate’s background – from 1993-99 and was about to be out of a job with LSU’s firing of Gerry DiNardo and the eventual hiring of Nick Saban after the 1999 season.

Bad football, no support, program in tatters … usually in this situation, the head coach is on the chopping block. That’s a fact of life in college athletics.

The folks on that 2007 jury didn’t understand any of that. What they did hear, and apparently believed, was an “expert witness” that said Baldwin’s firing cost him the chance to coach professionally in the NFL, and hence the $900,000 award for future lost wages.

The NFL? My gosh, the man had to go overtime to beat Wofford.

Racial discrimination? Throughout Baldwin’s tenure, UL was one of two I-A schools in the country with African-American head coaches in its two major sports, football and men’s basketball. And Jessie Evans might still be the Cajuns’ hoop coach had he not accepted another job after the 2004 season.

The difference was that Evans won games, winning Sun Belt Western Division titles each of his last three years and getting to postseason play in all three. Baldwin didn’t win games … it’s that simple.

Of course, nothing’s simple when it comes to the judicial system. According to the opinion from the three-judge appeals panel released Wednesday, the vacating of the original judgment still doesn’t have much to do with those terrible win-loss records and the state of the program.

That opinion cited problems with jury selection, confusion over the jury verdict form and the allowing of those “expert witnesses.” In other words, technicalities.

“A fair, impartial resolution requires a new trial,” the opinion stated.

The case can either go back to the appeals court to reconsider the ruling, to the state Supreme Court for a review, or back to trial. We probably won’t know the next step for a while.

So far, in sports parlance, the appeals court is 1-for-1, the district court is 0-for-1, the Supreme Court hasn’t had its turn at bat and the legal teams are the only ones getting close to their salary caps.

Remember, though, that sports parlance, and the usage of common sense, mean little inside court chambers. And that’s the scary part.