T-Mobile CEO John Legere

LAS VEGAS—T-Mobile's brash CEO, John Legere, implied that Softbank buying his company might not be all that bad if he gets to run it the way he's been running T-Mobile.

Rumors have been swirling for a few weeks now that Softbank, the deep-pocketed Japanese owner of Sprint, may want to buy T-Mobile. (For the record, I'm against it.) Legere never spoke up about the potential combination before, but he addressed it during the Q&A after T-­Mobile's CES press conference today.

Here's exactly what he said. Then I'll parse it for you: "Historically, the consolidation in this industry was generally about somebody buying somebody for spectrum. They didn't give a s**t about the business. All of the people who are rumoring around about T-Mobile, all they are talking about is spectrum. The T-Mobile UnCarrier business, the people, the brand, the attitude is here to stay," he said. CES 2014 Bug"There are options for the industry in the future that are consolidations that would provide significant scale. What we are is a brand, a focus on the consumer, a change agent, a maverick in the industry that I believe the U.S. feels is very important."

With a quote like this, you have to take it bit by bit. Here's what was going on.

First, notice that he never said he's completely against a merger.

Rather, he said that if the companies merge, they would have to do so with T-Mobile USA in charge.

The "spectrum" quote chords with something else he had said earlier, about Sprint being "a pile of spectrum waiting to be turned into a capability." In Legere's view, Sprint is a big empty bucket of spectrum; T-Mobile is an actual business. (Sprint, of course, would disagree.) So if the two were to merge, it would be so T-Mobile can apply its "Uncarrier" ideas on Sprint's deep spectrum portfolio, not the other way around.

There's another really important word in there, though: Maverick. In the antitrust regulation world, a "maverick" company needs to be protected because it has unusually strong competitive effects. When Legere says the U.S. feels having a maverick is important, he means the FCC and the Department of Justice.

So here's one way to decode Legere's quote.

"We'd like to have larger scale, and merging with Sprint would be one way to do that. But our business is so innovative that the government will protect it. If Softbank wants to buy us, it would need to be in a deal that puts us in charge and strips Sprint down for spectrum, not the other way around."

I'm still against it, by the way.