Brady’s appeals should end now
These cell phone revelations regarding New England golden boy Tom Brady are certainly troubling. If you can be suspended by the NFL, even in part, for destroying your cell phone, well, I don’t see myself ever getting on the field.
But there are differences between Brady and me, in fact several, the key one in terms of this discussion being that, while I am a serial destroyer of cell phones via any and all means of general doofusry, Brady is only known to have destroyed one — the one with all the texts to “The Deflator” on it. What a coincidence. This is what the NFL went out of its way to emphasize Tuesday,
when it finally got around to announcing the outcome of Brady’s 10-hour appeal of his four-game suspension heard June 23. The league said Brady let it be known at that time that he destroyed his cell phone in March, effectively sabotaging an investigation into whether he conspired with a couple of Patriots equipment men (including the one who emerged in the 243-page Ted Wells report as “The Deflator”) to alter footballs used in the AFC championship.
The Wells Report concluded that Brady did so conspire, based on the preponderance-of-evidence standard, and now Brady will likely sue the NFL in court, where the legal hurdles regarding burden of proof are more to his liking.
So I wouldn’t count No. 12 out of the Steelers opener at New England just yet. Mike Tomlin’s fellas can insist they want to play New England’s best all they want, but the rest of us know the approximate final scores for the night of Sept. 10.
Steelers 31, Jimmy Garoppolo & Company 17.
Brady (via Injunctive Relief) and the Patriots 45, Steelers 31.
But here’s some free legal advice for the poor put-upon Patriots passer: Sit down and shut up.
Sure you can litigate this mess, and you might even litigate successfully, as fellow NFL suspendees Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson did, but those abusers argued they were punished improperly under guidelines not in place at the time of their transgressions. You sir, will have to argue that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had no authority to hear the appeal, which you could have mentioned at any time in the 10 hours you spent in front of him June 23. Further, Goodell in fact has full authority to hear appeals, as set forth in the collective bargaining agreement between the league and your union brethren, the NFLPA, which now likely joins you in the litigation gambit.
That’s what the gamblers call a pick ’em proposition.
Brady’s legal maneuvers can take weeks or months, and even a win in court can bring an NFL appeal that can take weeks and months, and pretty soon the football season will be out of weeks and months.
The first thing Brady should do is ask his agent from screeching like a scalded goose. The parentheses in the following paragraph are mine, obviously.
“The Commissioner’s decision and discipline has no precedent in all of NFL history (uh, Ben Roethlisberger). His decision alters the competitive balance of the game (uh, Ben Roethlisberger took his team to the Super Bowl after a suspension of the exact same length). His decision is wrong and has no basis (uh, Ben Roethlisberger), and it diminishes the integrity of the game (uh, Ben Roethlisberger).”
The quarterback should accept his four-game suspension — the longest in-season suspension for a starting quarterback since Roethlisberger’s four-game in 2010, according to ESPN Stats & Info — and do himself and his teammates and the game the huge favor of not having the fallout from this slice of skullduggerous idiocy hang over the entire 2015 season.
Brady’s football legacy is secure, if by secure you mean he’s headed for the Hall of Fame, in alterably. But he’s mistaken if he thinks a protracted legal entanglement will help him add a coat of polish after a career spent as the lead attack dog for Darth Hoodie.
Brady and Bill Belichick and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who wisely said the club wouldn’t appeal the $1 million fine and two forfeited draft picks the deflation hijinks cost them, have a lot of nerve turning on Goodell in this matter or any other.
It was Goodell, lest anyone forget, who himself destroyed the evidence in the Spygate affair, in which the Patriots were caught filming the New York Jets’ defensive signals. Why was that evidence destroyed? Perhaps because the investigation revealed that Darth Hoodie’s video proclivities materially altered the outcome of a previous conference championship game or — God forbid — a Super Bowl, the crown jewel of NFL marketing. We’ll never know. What we know is that at the most recent Super Bowl, Brady claimed to be “very comfortable” that no one in the Patriots organization had done anything against the inflation rules, then four months later he was destroying his cell phone.
To be fair, he could have just done it the way I do it.
Drop it on the concrete, step on it with one foot, then whirl and kick it against curb with the other. He’s probably a little more agile than that.