The judge allowed the Sunday Ticket experts to testify, but after the verdict was announced, he dismissed their testimony.

There are two types of witnesses that may participate in civil trials: (1) factual witnesses, who speak about events relevant to the dispute; and (2) expert witnesses, who provide relevant opinions based on their education, training, and experience.

Plaintiffs in the Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit had their $4.7 billion judgment (and $14.1 billion in punitive damages) thrown out of court on Thursday because Judge Philip Gutierrez found that the plaintiffs’ expert testimony regarding financial damages was not credible.

That is exactly what happened, in the simplest possible terms. A judge who knew what the experts would say and let them say it, rejected the experts’ testimony after the jury reached its verdict.

So why let them testify in the first place? Why waste everyone’s time (including the jury’s) to have a four-week trial if the judge believed the expert witnesses’ testimony was insufficient?

The challenge in any antitrust case is to take the actual costs of antitrust violations and conjure up a hypothetical world in which the antitrust violations did not occur. That won’t be easy, especially when (as in this case) the NFL didn’t offer its own world but instead aggressively fought anything/everything the plaintiffs suggested.

Dr. Daniel Rascher, one of the court experts whose testimony was admitted until his testimony was barred, developed a model based on the NFL scrapping its Sunday Ticket program and selling out-of-market games to various networks that would carry the broadcasts from CBS and Fox.

It’s a simple concept. In each market, CBS and Fox would carry the games they always carry. Steelers in Pittsburgh. Packers in Milwaukee. Falcons in Atlanta. Dolphins in Miami. Etc. etc. Then, in each market, the remaining games would be carried by a collection of networks and/or cable channels — NBC, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, FS1, USA, NFL Network, and/or TNT.

The end result could have been this or that. Ultimately, it would be up to the NFL and its broadcast partners to find a world that didn’t violate antitrust laws.

How could anyone know what the NFL would do if it couldn’t sell Sunday Ticket in its current form? In this case, the plaintiffs were trying to prove what the world would look like without antitrust violations. And the judge either wouldn’t or couldn’t fathom that without Sunday Ticket, the NFL could have figured out how to distribute games for free on nine or ten different networks at 1:00 p.m. ET. Or maybe the league could have decided to start Sundays with a game at 12:00 p.m., then another at 12:30 p.m. ET, then every half hour, broadcasting them all day long and allowing fans to watch any, part, or all of any game.

Judges often solve the maze of facts and law in a case by choosing a preferred goal and working backward. In this case, it is clear that the judge did not want the plaintiff to win. But he did not dismiss the case before the verdict because he thought the jury could protect him from that. After the verdict, he had no choice. To get where he wanted to go, he had to dismiss the entire case.

The judge’s flawed thinking is strewn throughout his 16-page opinion. For example, in footnote 6 on page 7, he writes that “Dr. Rascher’s solutions were inconsistent with the record. CBS President Sean McManus testified that CBS would not provide its channels to competitors…or allow those networks to ‘advertise in any way’ on its channels.” McManus’s testimony was purely speculative and self-serving. If the NFL had told CBS that in order to broadcast in-market games in more than 200 markets nationwide, it would have to provide out-of-market channels to other networks, CBS would have gotten mad and complained, but it ultimately did. We know this because CBS did the same thing with Sunday Ticket when CBS returned to broadcasting the NFL in 1998.

CBS hates Sunday Ticket. CBS wishes Sunday Ticket would die. And CBS tolerates Sunday Ticket’s existence by giving DirecTV (and now YouTube) the CBS channels.

But Judge Gutierrez accepted the hypothetical claim of an executive who no longer even works at CBS as a matter of fact. To use a technical legal term, that’s nonsense.

Remember, the judge did not find that the jury was wrong to find that Sunday Ticket violated the antitrust laws. He specifically found that there was sufficient evidence to support a verdict on the issue of liability. He threw out the verdict because he found that the expert witnesses he was allowed to testify were not reliable.

And so, millions of consumers who paid too much for Sunday Ticket (like me, and maybe you) are left with an antitrust decision but no chance of recovering 12 years of class-action compensation because a judge found the expert testimony was insufficient — after he had found it was good enough.

That makes no sense. Not at all. And given the news that the judge is retiring in October, he’s probably not worried about the case being overturned and sent back for a new trial on damages. He won’t have to clean up the mess if/when the appellate court sends the case back — as the appellate court already did after another judge dismissed the entire case.