DEFLATE-GREAT!
Kraft still sits atop NFL & is digging every moment
Can an NFL owner cost his team 15 yards in the season opener for taunting in the offseason? Patriots owner Robert Kraft has been on a three-month victory celebration of the Patriots’ latest championship and now he’s rubbing it in the faces of his partners.
He’s basically taken the Patriots’ five Lombardi Trophies and joined hands with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and is dancing the hora around Roger Goodell and the other 31 owners.
Kraft believes teams not as successful as New England — that would be everybody — conspired against him to get Goodell to nail Brady with a four-game suspension, fine the Patriots $1 million and take away their firstand fourth-round draft picks in the Deflategate fiasco.
“Well, I don’t hold grudges, but I also don’t forget anything,” Kraft said in an interview this week on Bloomberg. “Envy and jealousy are incurable diseases.” That’s a low blow and it’s great. Nothing like a little sniping from a feisty, soon-to-be 76-yearold man worth $5.2 billion.
Kraft one day will be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his contributions to the league — he’s been instrumental in network TV negotiations, the end of the 2011 lockout and teaching owners how to make even more money — but he feels his team was unfairly punished and that the league tried to humiliate Brady, whom he considers his fifth son. And he’s right.
Kraft explained that he’s passionate about owning a team in his hometown but would be so angry at the people running his team if, now that he’s in his 24th season, he had never won the Super Bowl.
“So our competitors, I understand how they brought pressure on the league office to be very strong and not compromise in an issue that was nonsense and foolishness,” he said.
If all owners had Kraft’s drive and competitiveness to win, and were not just happy that their teams are worth 10 times what they paid for them, then perhaps the Patriots would not have won so many Super Bowls.
Kraft fell in love with Belichick when Belichick was an assistant to Bill Parcells in New England in 1996 and wanted to promote him when Parcells ran to the Jets after that season.
But he felt he needed to make a clean break from Parcells, so he hired Pete Carroll and Belichick joined Parcells back in New York. Carroll inherited a team filled with young talent, but Kraft overcompensated after giving Parcells total control and limited Carroll’s influence, which was a mistake. Carroll lasted three seasons and each year the Patriots won fewer games. After the 1999 season, Kraft fired Carroll and wrestled with the Jets for a while before getting Belichick.
“When I hired (Belichick), people told me I shouldn’t,” he GETTY said. “But it’s about the simpatico of a connection. What is right for me may not be right for you.”
Kraft could not have possibly known Belichick, who was just 37-45 in five years in his first head coaching job in Cleveland, would turn out to be the greatest coach of this generation, maybe the greatest coach of all time. And Kraft and Belichick had no clue when they drafted Brady in the sixth round in 2000 as the 199th overall pick and seventh QB selected, that they would find the greatest QB of all time who will be 40 this summer and incredibly is getting better with age.
“All of those gurus who we spend millions of dollars on scouting and everything,” Kraft said. “How everybody missed him is just … it’s really amazing.”
Kraft is stepping on other owners from his perch on top of the NFL who may want to return the favor when the Patriots descend after Brady retires, which doesn’t appear to be anytime soon.
Kraft was angry Brady had to sit out the first month of last season but conceded it may have been a blessing. “He didn’t play the first four games, which is 25% of the season,” Kraft said. “The good news is, he took no wear and tear on his body.”
He said with the Patriots down 28-3 with three minutes left in the third quarter “we had a .04% chance to win, 99.6% chance to lose, and to come back after everything that had happened, you know, it’s a great lesson for the millennials.”
Hard work, sticking together and never giving up was his message. But despite all the success, Kraft can’t let go of Deflategate. It will inspire Brady until he quits, keep the frown on Belichick’s sourpuss face and guarantee that Kraft remains feisty.