The
GAME Mike Florio on Hardin vs Buzbee Feud
M
ike Florio is a lawyer and a broadcast contributor to NBC’s Football Night In America and Sunday Night Football’s Post Game Show. After graduating from Central Catholic High School in Wheeling in 1983, Florio said he pursued an engineering career at Carnegie Mellon. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with two engineering degrees and from West Virginia University’s law school in 1991. Florio began writing for a now-defunct site called NFLtalk.com in June 2000. When that site went under and was bought out by ESPN.com, Florio got hired on there and wrote a rumor and news report. After his six-month contract expired with ESPN.com, he decided to start his own site. In 2001 Florio started his wildly popular sports blog ProFootballTalk. com which is now an affiliate of NBC Sports. He still owns and writes for the site. Local ESPN Radio host John Granato caught up with him recently on the Dejaun Watson lawsuit.
20 | Mv | May + June 2021
John Granato: Mike, How are you? Mike Florio: Doing great. How are you guys? John Granato: In your opinion as a lawyer, what do you think the scorecard reads right now, Tony Buzbee versus Rusty Hardin? Mike Florio: Well, it depends what court we’re talking about. A court of law, Hardin has the only victory in the only skirmish that they’ve had, which is forcing the names of the plaintiffs onto the lawsuits, have resulted in one of the lawsuits being dropped, although it could be refiled. Court of public opinion, I think overall, Buzbee’s been mopping up the floor with Hardin from day one. Even before Hardin was involved, Buzbee’s been winning. I don’t agree with all of his tactics, but I think he’s done a very good job of trying the case in the court of public opinion. Rusty Hardin is seeing how this is going with the public, maybe he’ll think I can’t go to court with this because I see how bad it is for Deshaun publicly. Mike Florio: Well, it’s more than that, too, because Deshaun is inherently a public individual. Putting pressure on him through those channels relates to
and translates to settlement value. You know, at the end of the day, there is a loose number that gets placed on any civil litigation, and a typical personal injury case, car accident, It’s driven by the medical bills, lost wages, other outof-pocket expenses. That becomes the primary factor for ultimately putting a value on the case for settlement purposes as you try to get it worked out before you roll the dice with the jury. With a case like this where there really isn’t any tangible out-of-pocket expense you can point to, the value has to come from somewhere. And from Deshaun Watson’s perspective, the fact that this could put his football career on hold until these cases are resolved and the longer this lasts, he’s eventually going to be put in a position where you have to choose between invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or testifying. And if he pleads the fifth, he’s basically forfeiting the civil cases. And if he testifies, he could get twisted up into the kind of knots that would be a blueprint for a prosecutor if someone decides to actually proceed with criminal charges. So there’s value in making this all disappear. And I don’t mean that in any way other than handling it the right way, giv-
