Money, money, money.
Lies, deception or lack of trust.
That does seem to be the heart of the matter. I suspect that Bucknuts will have an upperhand in the discovery process - not by virtue of thorough leverage, but more because every document they see on Scout's financials will give tham information they never before held in hand.
All of the serious allegations center on, or devolve to, the alleged lack of clear accounting by Scout of revenues, customer leads, advertising revenues. There are also serious allegations concerning Scout's inability to execute the Magazine Agreement - but in truth, those could go away once the document search is complete. (Bucknuts alleges that Scout never made clear how large the newstand sales were, and hence assumes that they have received less revenue than their due.)
There are some odd things in this though - things to which I, as a non-lawyer would, if on a jury go either "What?" or "You are kidding me!"
What? - Bucknuts includes in its complaint an excerpt from the original web-site agreement from 2001 that is intended to bolster their claim that Scout did not live up to its obligations to provide a higher quality of recruiting coverage than Bucknuts was doing prior to joining Scout. (Specifically give great in and out of state recruiting coverage - the lack thereof demanding that Bucknuts hire its own scouts or gurus).
Anyone remember the layout and depth of coverage - the recruiting database if you will from 2001, prior to Scout? I think Scout could make a good case that they provided material that improved on that offering by Bucknuts, no matter its real and actual deficiencies in rating players of importance to Bucknuts in or out of state.
The one that was a real "You have to be kidding" moment is when Bucknuts complains that they are forced to hand-code the HTML for their web-pages, thus adding to their costs. That doesn't stand up to the common sense test. There are plenty of simple, free, and powerful HTML editors available on the Internet that would handle all the coding. That complaint (which is minor in the scheme of things) simply does not wash.