NFL faces legal fight after rejecting appeal
Issues surrounding Deflategate not about to go away any time soon
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — The appeal is dead. Long live the appeal.
That’s where Deflategate stands after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Tuesday denied Tom Brady’s appeal of his four-game suspension.
In so doing, Goodell sharply criticized the superstar New England Patriots quarterback for ordering the destruction of his infamous cellphone late last winter.
The NFL players union announced its intention to fight Goodell’s latest ruling in court. Multiple reports said it will seek an injunction in Federal Court on Wednesday.
Only such a temporary court ruling can now prevent Brady from sitting out the Patriots’ first four games of the regular season: against Pittsburgh, at Buffalo, against Jacksonville and (following a bye) at Dallas.
Brady can play in pre-season games and practise throughout training camp, which for the Patriots begins Wednesday (with players reporting) and Thursday (with the first practice).
The NFL attempted to preempt the union’s expected court filing with a nifty one of its own on Tuesday, an attempt to validate Goodell’s decision, and in a friendlier Federal Court (in Manhattan) than the union prefers (in Minneapolis).
In his ironically titled 20-page “final decision,” Goodell blasted Brady for ordering in March — on the day of his interview with lead Deflategate investigators, no less — the destruction of the cellphone he had used since late last season, including in the days following the Jan. 18 AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts.
Goodell wrote Tuesday that Brady’s legal team did not inform the league of the cellphone’s destruction for three months, until the day of the three-time Super Bowl MVP’s appeal hearing in June.
Since February, lead Deflategate investigator Ted Wells and his team had been pleading with Brady to turn over that cellphone so they could examine the electronic information contained inside — namely texts, emails and calls. Brady refused. Wells’s report, issued May 6, concluded it was “more likely than not” that Brady was “at least generally aware” that two equipment managers conspired to deflate footballs the Patriots used on offence in their AFC title-game win over the Colts.
Based on Wells’s findings, the NFL five days later suspended Brady without pay for the first four games of 2015, fined the Patriots $1 million and stripped the team of its first-round draft pick next year and a fourthrounder in 2017.
Wells was widely criticized for reaching such an iffy conclusion. Goodell was far more definitive — and harsher — than Wells in explaining why he denied Brady’s appeal.
“In short, the available electronic evidence, coupled with information compiled in the investigators’ interviews, leads me to conclude that Mr. Brady knew about, approved of, consented to, and provided inducements and rewards in support of a scheme by which (the two equipment handlers) tampered with the game balls,” the commissioner wrote.
“Mr. Brady’s direction that his cellphone (and its relevant evidence) be destroyed on or about March 6 is very troubling. Rather than simply failing to co-operate, Mr. Brady made a deliberate effort to ensure that investigators would never have access to information that he had been asked to produce…
“Mr. Brady’s conduct gives rise to an inference that information from his cellphone, if it were available, would further demonstrate his direct knowledge of and involvement with the scheme to tamper with the game balls prior to the AFC Championship Game (and) leads me to conclude that he was attempting to conceal evidence of his personal involvement in the tampering scheme, just as he concealed for months the fact he had destroyed the cellphone requested by the investigators.”
Brady’s lawyer Don Yee issued a blistering rebuttal, in which he called Goodell’s decision “deeply disappointing, but not surprising because the appeal process was thoroughly lacking in procedural fairness (and was) a sham.”
For its part, the NFL Players Association announced it will appeal Goodell’s “outrageous decision.”
So Brady versus the NFL probably is in the offing, meaning this year’s Deflategate melodrama won’t end any time soon.
It could take months just to determine which U.S. Federal Court would hear the union’s appeal. And perhaps years to reach a final verdict.
Appealing? Not very.
Ratherthan simply failing to co-operate, Mr. Brady made a deliberate effort to ensure that investigators would never have access to information that he had been asked to produce.
ROGER GOODELL
WRITING IN 20-PAGE REPORT