Jury Awards $2.1 Million to Cobb in USC Bias Suit

Apparently agreeing that USC unfairly penalized former assistant athletic director Marvin Cobb for complaining that the university’s black athletes weren’t getting the education promised them, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Cobb $2.1 million Monday.

USC said it would challenge half of the award immediately, and also ask for a new trial.

The case began in November of 1990 when Cobb sued, charging racial bias for his not having been promoted. Cobb, hired in 1986, claimed he wasn’t given a promised promotion after two years.

A Trojan football and baseball player at USC in the 1970s and later an NFL player, Cobb was transferred in 1991 from the USC athletic department to the university’s medical school as an associate dean for business affairs. That occurred a week after Cobb had criticized USC in a Sports Illustrated article, detailing problems he said black USC athletes had in getting counseling and tutoring.

“We’re disappointed,” said Bob Lane, USC’s general counsel, of Monday’s jury award. “We were very surprised. The university intends to take all appropriate action in seeking to ask the judge (William Drake) to reconsider the amount of the award. We’ll ask for a new trial and we will appeal to the Court of Appeals.”

Cobb was delighted, saying he had paid a price to make his point.

“I sacrificed quite a bit to make a point I feel was valid,” he said.

“Universities need to live up to their obligation and educate student-athletes properly. I sacrificed my athletic administrative career on that point.”

Cobb was put on unpaid administrative leave by USC in February, when the case went to trial.

Carl Douglas, co-counsel for USC, said USC would seek to strike from the award $1 million in emotional damages. Cobb was also awarded $1.1 million in economic damages. “We don’t feel the emotional-damages award can be sustained under California law,” Douglas said.

The jury was undecided on Cobb’s race-discrimination charge in the suit, and Douglas said, “We have plans to retry that count.”

Cobb has contended from the outset that he was not promoted by USC because of racial bias and because he had spoken about alleged mistreatment of black athletes.

USC contended that Cobb was not promoted because he was not keeping “regular office hours.”

The suit originally named then-USC athletic director Mike McGee, who left the university in early 1993 to become athletic director at South Carolina.

Mike Garrett, then associate athletic director, was named to succeed McGee shortly afterward. But Cobb, two years after filing suit against USC, also applied for the post.

Cobb has also maintained that he and McGee had disagreed over how to counsel and tutor black USC athletes who were low achievers academically.

Last March, he told the Daily Trojan, USC’s student newspaper, “SC loves to point to its academic resource center for athletes, and say it’s the shining example of how seriously they take academics for athletes, and how many resources there are available for those who struggle.”

But Cobb called the counseling-academics program for USC athletes “a mirage.”

“It’s like having a calculus-tutoring service for students who haven’t passed geometry,” he said.