Deflategate could ultimately cost Goodell his job
WASHINGTON NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell predetermined guilt in Deflategate. That’s clear now.
He has smeared Tom Brady and the New England Patriots without proper evidence or a competent investigation, and turned an unimportant misdemeanour into a damaging scandal, as part of a personal power play to shore up his flagging authority.
In other cases, he just looked inept. In this one, he looks devious.
Thursday night at the NFL owners meetings in San Francisco, Goodell as much as admitted the Wells report is incomplete, despite the fact it took five months, cost multi-millions in legal fees, and was supposed to be comprehensive. After all, the league used it to levy historically harsh penalties against Brady and the Patriots, claiming they deflated footballs in the AFC Championship Game.
Nevertheless, Goodell opened the door to walking it back, saying he wants to talk personally to Brady, who has appealed his fourgame suspension.
“I look forward to hearing directly from Tom if there is new information or there is information that can be helpful to us in getting this right,” Goodell said.
This is the height of disingenuousness. Because we already know the Wells report missed crucial information and didn’t consider important facts.
Wells either overlooked or ignored crucial text messages, he used a firm with a reputation for bending science to fit predetermined conclusions, and he cherry-picked the memory of an NFL referee.
But that’s not all. The Wells Report left completely unexamined the fact the NFL has never once considered the inflation of footballs to be a matter of great integrity or competitive advantage, before now.
And this is where Brady can blow the commissioner out of a courtroom. And perhaps out of his job.
League history makes it obvious Goodell is practicing selective enforcement, purely for his own purpose. The NFL rules simply state that footballs should be inflated within a range of 12.5-13.5 pounds per square inch. For more than a decade, it has let each team provide a dozen balls, and let quarterbacks choose them according to preference and feel, and to fiddle with the pressure, without penalty.
Aaron Rodgers has said he tells his equipment guys to over-inflate the ball, and see if the referees catch it.
That the league has never enforced standards is evident. According to the Wells report, in a game between the Patriots and Jets, it was discovered the refs had inflated the balls to 16 psi. Brady became upset when he found them hard to handle. That’s how uneven ball inflation in the NFL is, and how weak the Wells report is.
The only firm evidence that Brady ever had a conversation with anyone about ball pressure comes in this instance, when the ball was wildly over-inflated by the league’s own refs.
What’s more, messing with the ball has been treated as a misdemeanour in other cases.
In a very cold 2014 game between the Carolina Panthers and Minnesota Vikings, cameras showed team attendants warming footballs in front of heaters, presumably at the behest of a quarterback. There was no scandal for “tampering.” There wasn’t even an investigation. The NFL simply sent out a memo that softening the ball on the sideline by warming it isn’t allowed.
At a minimum, the Wells report is poor work, and the NFL may well have skewed it. Just consider how the report used referee Walt Anderson’s recollections. It accepts Anderson’s account as accurate when it comes to how pressurized the Patriots’ footballs were in pregame. It also accepts Anderson’s account when he said there were two gauges available, one with a logo on it that gave higher readings by almost 0.4.
But when Anderson says he used the gauge that gave the higher psi measurements, the Wells report suddenly treats Anderson as inaccurate on this point — and no other. For no apparent reason, Wells insists Anderson must have used the other gauge, the one that gave lower readings, and which makes the Patriots look guilty.
As opposed to the higher gauge, which would put it in the realm of possibility that the footballs lost pressure by halftime due to the effects cold weather and the Ideal Gas Law.
Once you’ve read this part of the Wells report, the words it so often employs — “more probable than not” and “likely” — begin to take on a pernicious tone.
The NFL created its own mischief here. It wrote a rule that says each team can use a dozen of their own balls, and left it to the teams to inflate them, without providing any sort of regulation or consistent enforcement. Now, all of a sudden, what a year ago was the subject of a mere memo has become the subject of a months-long, milliondollar game of Gotcha. Why?
Don’t tell me it’s because Tom Brady didn’t turn over his cellphone. Wells had all of the phone records and texts between Brady and equipment manager John Jastremski, and there was no communication at all with locker-room attendant Jim McNally.
The records suggest Brady’s not withholding; he’s just a union man who objects to giving his private phone to the commissioner.
And here again, Goodell is practicing selective punishment. Brett Favre didn’t turn his cell over either, in a far more unpalatable case over sexual harassment in the workplace. Goodell gave him a $50,000 fine. With no suspension.
The commissioner needed a big case to restore his authority and prestige, after a series of judicial embarrassments. Federal judge David Doty reversed him on Adrian Peterson’s suspension. Arbitrator Barbara Jones overturned him (and found him not credible) for suspending Ray Rice twice for the same offence. And former commissioner Paul Tagliabue issued a stunning rebuke in the New Orleans Saints Bounty Gate case, when he not only reversed player suspensions but found a pattern of “arbitrary” and selective punishments by Goodell.
The guess here is that Goodell’s support and respect among owners was eroded badly after he mishandled each of these cases and turned them into months-long scandals that undermined public trust in the league office.
Deflategate is nothing more than a bid to reconsolidate his power. But it’s an overreach as usual, and whatever Goodell gained in the short term may be his undoing in the long term.