The one-issue trial between former XFL Commissioner Oliver Luck and former XFL benefactor Vince McMahon is set for trial next month. And it seems unlikely that anything will keep that from happening at this point.
As noted by Daniel Kaplan of TheAthletic.com, a settlement conference was held on Wednesday. The official docket says that it lasted nine minutes.
This strongly implies that the presiding judge realized based on the parties’ respective positions that any effort to try to resolve the case would have been fruitless. That the two sides are too far apart and too dug in to ever reach a middle ground.
It reminds me of a court-ordered mediation in which I participated in the 1990s. The mediator asked the plaintiff for its settlement position. Then the mediator asked the defendant for its settlement position. Then, the mediator said, “Well, we can either waste three hours sitting here looking at each other, or we can go do something productive.” The whole thing din’t last nine minutes. It may have been 10.
It sounds as if that’s what happened for Luck and McMahon. And so the case will go to trial, with $24 million or so riding on whether the jury believes that McMahon fired Luck for cause two months after the signing of former NFL receiver Antonio Callaway despite a mandate to avoid players with off-field issues, or whether that was a pretext for dumping Luck’s salary a day before the second iteration of the XFL imploded over the pandemic.