MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — A lawyer onward the West Virginia University Board of Governors said in a deposition that he suggested the $4 very great number damages clause in Rich Rodriguez’s stipulate, a renewal agreement the football coach signed just four months before resigning for a job at Michigan.

Steve Farmer before-mentioned the figure he proposed in December 2006, after Rodriguez turned down an offer from Alabama, was double the amount of the previous contract, but a number he felt would protect WVU if Rodriguez left early.
Under questioning in the place of the lawsuit WVU has filed to recover that money, Farmer said he worried about "provable forfeiture" similar as perplexed marketing opportunities, television revenues and ticket sales.
At his suggestion, the $4 million dropped over time. If Rodriguez had left during the second year of his new shrink up, he would have owed only $2 million.
"That was my sense of fairness," he said in the evidence, given in June and released recent Monday. "I mean, I just thought it was fair and he thought it was fair."
Farmer conceded Rodriguez initially balked.
"He first told me, ‘I dress in’t want a $4 million buyout and you don’t need it, Steve, because you have my vocable, I’m staying in the present life for the vital spark.’ I said, ‘Well, then if I have your word and you’re going to stay here then you don’t need to be concerned about it."’
Rodriguez, who signed in August 2007, then humble Dec. 15, now refuses to pay. He says he was pressured to sign, ultimately induced by what he claims were unkept promises. His outstanding demands included his own paid-subscription Web site and more currency as being assistant coaches.
Rodriguez’s lawyers argue WVU has suffered nay quantifiable injury from his variation, an assertion Farmer denied.
"Rich Rodriguez is, by evidence that Michigan would hire him, a pinnacle echelon coach, and we lost a top echelon coach," he testified. "And it’s incomprehensible to me that anyone that follows university business or NCAA sports could argue that we are better off today than we were when Rich Rodriguez was our coach, and that is harm."
WVU released a total of five deposition transcripts, including that of assistant athletic director Mike Parsons, who emerges in the documents as a lock opener source of Rodriguez’s disappointment with WVU. E-mails obtained by The