The defense would now like to call Scott Woodward to the stand...

Tequilla said:

DerekJohnson said:

Tequilla said:

For what?

SC is going to call Woodward to the stand to say that Sark was a drunk at UW?

Then Sark's lawyers are going to ask them why they didn't do more to put Sark either in rehab or was his drinking to the point where they considered firing him? Woodward probably answers that he didn't proceed to fire him because of alcoholism being a delicate line to walk in terms of terminating somebody so instead he didn't put up much of a fight when SC tried to hire him away.

Hard for me to see how SC using Woodward as a witness helps them.

@Tequilla you don't see the point. Woodward would have to sit there on the record and document what occurred at UW and then answer for why he looked the other way for five years.

How do I not see the point when I stated that Woodward was going to be asked to talk about how drunk Sark was at the UW, why UW didn't do more to curtail the problem, and what help did they offer him? Sure seems to me that I acknowledged that Woodward was going to a) be on record and b) answer for what happened at UW. To say that he looked the other way is pure conjecture at this point because we don't know what was or was not done by the Athletic Department other than they didn't seem to go out of their way to keep Sark when Pat Haden came calling.

None of this matters anyway because this case will likely never get to court and Woodward will likely never be asked to testify. Best case is that he's asked to give a deposition ... which since the court will never be part of public record and the deposition will never be entered into such as evidence will never be available for public consumption unless leaked.

If this goes to trial then good chance that Woodward will have to answer on the record. But the odds of this are lower than the odds that Ektard gets a recruiting scoop right.

If I'm being honest, the part that bothers me here is the sense that we'll get to play "gotcha" on Woodward ... who cares? Seriously ... who cares? Lots of things happen behind closed doors that aren't anybody's business and on a need to know basis. One of the biggest problems I have with society right now is that everybody thinks that they are entitled to be all up into everybody's business. They aren't. We didn't pay a severance package to Sark. There doesn't appear to be any material misappropriation of funds. The on field performance wasn't such where you could argue that we weren't getting what we were paying for other than maybe it influenced a win or two a year at most. I get that Sark made millions. I get that Woodward makes a healthy chunk of change. But these kinds of situations happen all the time every single day around the world where C-levels, Presidents, VPs, etc. "resign" and given significant parachute packages to go away and remain quiet. In my general experience, those that complain the most about this are often those that don't understand why those packages are given whether it be for the institutional secrets that are known by those parties, risk of lawsuits, etc. Agreements are signed to maintain confidentiality and many times those individuals have non-compete agreements in place that protect the current employer. No question that sometimes these situations can get abused. But at the same time, when talking about people at these levels, those agreements require approval from an oversight committee, etc. The reality is that when you're running a detailed organization, which the UW AD is, there's plenty of different considerations that you have to make and balancing priorities and sometimes the lesser of two evils is the hand that you're played.

There's plenty of things to give Woody shit that are well within his control and reasonable to expect the UW AD to do better on. I'm not sure questioning how he handled the Sark situation is one of those. This is the kind of shit sandwich that nobody wants to handle and handling it is one of those that you have to do delicately or you end up in a court room getting your ass handed to you.