Okla St Loses Bid To Regain $33M From Fundraiser

However, athletic director Mike Holder signed policy delivery receipt forms two years earlier and didn’t ask to see full copies from Lincoln, which had kept them. Oklahoma State proceeded to pay the premiums of over $16 million for the next two years before attempting to back out of the plan.

Solis ruled that Holder technically had received the policies on behalf of Cowboy Athletics Inc., the private foundation run by OSU’s athletic department.

“It was Holder’s own decision not to read the legal documents he signed and to not read the policies. Based on these documents, both Lincoln and Cowboy subsequently treated the issued policies as valid, and they both performed under the contracts,” Solis wrote in his ruling. “For Cowboy to now claim breach of contract based on an alleged failure of delivery of the policies would itself be inequitable.”

The insurance company and brokers argued that the plan fell apart because Oklahoma State rushed into it without first arranging financing to pay for the premiums.

Attorneys produced a paper trail from Holder’s emails with him writing once that if it wasn’t done as soon as Pickens wanted, “I will be in a cave with Bin Laden.”

The school was unwilling to use Pickens’ $165 million donation to the athletic department as collateral on a loan, and that fund eventually took a hit when the economy soured. Pickens eventually had to make another donation just to complete renovations to the football stadium.

Solis ruled that the brokers had not misled Oklahoma State, and instead the university “chose to proceed despite warnings from its advisers regarding mortality rates and statistical sampling error and warnings from the brokers concerning the absence of long-term financing.”