The June 27 verdict by the jury in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California could have cost the NFL and its teams $14.1 billion, given that damages can be tripled under federal antitrust laws.

“We are grateful for today’s ruling in the Sunday Ticket class-action lawsuit,” the NFL said in a written statement. “We believe that the NFL’s media distribution model provides our fans with an array of options to follow the game they love, including local broadcasts of every single game on free over-the-air television. We thank Judge Gutierrez for his time and attention to this case and look forward to an exciting 2024 NFL season.”

In a 16-page ruling, Gutierrez wrote that he agreed with the NFL’s contention that the testimony of two witnesses for the Sunday Ticket subscribers, Daniel Rascher and John Zona, should be excluded because the models they developed were not based on sound methodology.

“The Court agrees that Dr. Rascher’s and Dr. Zona’s testimonies based on their flawed methodologies should be excluded,” Gutierrez wrote. “And because there was no other support for the class-wide injury and damages elements of Plaintiffs’… claims, judgment as a matter of law for the Defendants is appropriate.”

Sunday Ticket is a broadcasting package that shows the NFL’s out-of-market Sunday games. The case focused on how the NFL sold its Sunday Ticket package to DirecTV, a satellite TV service, before moving it last season to Google’s YouTube. The plaintiffs argued that the NFL selling the games in a single package to a single distributor violated antitrust laws by not offering consumers more choice and artificially inflating the cost. The NFL maintained that Sunday Ticket is a “premium product” and the league’s system for distributing its games allowed most of its games to be available on broadcast television.

Gutierrez wrote that “[e]ven if the Court did not find that judgment as a matter of law was appropriate, the Court would have vacated the jury’s damages verdict, remitted Defendants’ award to nominal damages, and conditionally granted a new trial based on the jury’s irrational damages award.”

The court instructed the jury on the proper way to calculate damages, Gutierrez wrote, adding: “The Court finds that the jury’s damages awards were not based on the ‘evidence and reasonable inferences’ but instead were more akin to ‘guesswork or speculation.’ ”

According to Gutierrez’s ruling, the jury “did not follow the Court’s instructions and instead relied on inputs not tied to the record to create its own ‘overcharge.’ ” The judge wrote that he was granting the NFL’s motion for judgment as a matter of law “as, without the testimonies of Dr. Rascher and Dr. Zona, no reasonable jury could have found class-wide injury or damages.”

The plaintiffs can appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The jury’s verdict could have cost each NFL team about $440 million.

“We obviously disagree with the jury verdict,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC last month. “We are committed, obviously, to following the legal process. It’s a long process. We’re aware of that.”