From out of the blue, and a without much detail, is news West Virginia Radio Corp. and WVU have settled their lawsuits against one another and agreed to dismiss the proceedings.

There isn’t much to this and there isn’t much more I can tell. I’m frankly surprised it’s been done-ish for two months now with no mention of this before yesterday, though I can explain and offer a theory. I’m more surprised that many of the people I’ve spoken to the past 30 or so hours were caught unaware of this and without any reaction.

Without People to talk to here, I took to lawyers and legal folk I know and bounced some things off them and let them throw some ideas at me. I think we can make some sense of this.

What I do know is nothing’s finished because nothing is signed and filed. There isn’t a living document right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing were settled in word and then lawyers — and there are so many involved here — brought other matters to their forefronts.

The thought is this two-month gap between settlement and signatures is nothing to note. They still have to finish this, but they have other items to address first (and remember, this has been going on for two years as of today). So given the slide to the back burner and a focus on other business, it takes time to get around to this to settle language and legalese and make sure this is finished when its finished. Basically, these two sides don’t want have to deal with one another any longer than they have to, and all they have to do now is tie this off tightly. Give it the time it warrants, but give it no more time than it deserves.

What of the settlement? Impossible to know. Fun to speculate.

Let’s assume the obvious: No one’s going to be allowed to talk about this. There has to be a confidentiality agreement in this, perhaps for several years, perhaps in perpetuity. That’s important because it transcends a non-disparagement disagreement, in which one side can’t speak negatively of the other. We’re thinking no one is allowed to mention the settlement at all.

Secondly, could there be some agreement in which WVU agrees to align IMG College with West Virginia Radio Corp. for future business? That’s pretty interesting, and if you’re thinking about settling a dispute, you think about what one side might offer to make the other side lower its weapons. If John Raese was going to remain vigilant — and as recently as February, there were signs Raese would indeed stand against WVU — then perhaps the university, now with a new president and athletic director, would see no sense in continuing this and capitulate in some sense.

The reaction, which, again, comes from people I know as friends and colleagues and connections, doubted that would be the case. WVU had been too firm in its position, going so far as to file its own suit against Team Raese, to back away now, especially when Team Raese had not been seen to win (m)any battles. After all, WVU had to re-bid and still contracted IMG. What could possibly change now?

(Further, I was asked if Raese would really want to do business with WVU. Good point, I suppose, but without answering that, because I just don’t know, my hope is that it happens one day. Brush all the past to the side. His network would greatly strengthen WVU’s product and best enable the fans who do at times suffer with this still-new IMG arrangement. Cooperation still seems unlikely, and that’s the major reason we don’t think anything like that would dare be suggested, never mind involved in a settlement.)

What of financials? That has to somehow be involved in a settlement. It again seems unlikely WVU would settle and get money from Team Raese. We couldn’t come up with a plausible scenario for that outcome, meaning they couldn’t and I just uh-huhed on the other side of the conversation. Mostly likely, Raese made some coin off of this, perhaps only to agree to settle, though perhaps it was also his idea and he was, I guess, rewarded.

There comes a point when it doesn’t make sense to continue, and Raese was at one point scheduled to give his deposition in the middle of April. Maybe he reached that point and said, “Nah.” Maybe he was deposed and said, “Whoops.” Who knows, for now? But let’s say he told his lawyer the time had come and the lawyer called WVU’s people. There still has to be some incentive for Raese to drop all of this.

Let’s remember again how long this has been going on and that he’s had to pay his legal team. Let’s use a round number pulled from thin air and guesstimate he spent a million bucks a year and racked up $2 million in legal fees. What I was told by these folks was that universities tend to have insurance policies in place to protect officials from litigation while working on behalf of the university. In short, this is what protects Jim Clements and Oliver Luck from being targeted by a lawsuit and then having to pay out of their own pockets, or for WVU to pay out of its coffers, for what they did while performing their own jobs in a manner WVU can defend.

These policies have ceilings and will only pay out a specific maximum. Let’s again pull a round number out of the air and say $500,000 here. The insurer pays Team Raese half a mill and Raese is technically up that money, but out three times that in the end.  Again, estimations, but you get the picture.

All of that is followed by a handshake, or perhaps in this case an email, and everyone is summarily dismissed from their involvement in the case. In some time now — and let’s assume “soon” since we’re talking about it — we’ll know all the specifics, but I do think you have an idea how it might happen.