FUMBLE SOMEHOW STILL A TOUCHDOWN
Goodell’s clumsy handling of “Deflategate” scandal should cost him his job. But it won’t.
The thing about NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is that he’s a useful idiot. For all his pratfalls, he hasn’t managed to screw up the NFL’s core mission, which is to generate billions of dollars and make itself so indispensable to American life that no mere scandal, or gang of scandals, can derail the machine. Well, the machine is chugging right along, cheers.
That doesn’t mean Goodell cannot try, in this most futile of tasks. The ol’ Rog lost another appeal on Thursday, when a federal judge overturned Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for probably being generally aware that the Patriots were under-inflating footballs. Brady won: Goodell, and his chosen lawyers, were pantsed.
“The Award is premised upon several significant legal deficiencies,” Judge Richard Berman wrote, “including (A) inadequate notice to Brady of both his potential discipline (four-game suspension) and his alleged misconduct; (B) denial of the opportunity for Brady to examine one of two lead investigators, namely NFL Executive Vice President and General Counsel Jeff Pash; and (C) denial of equal access to investigative files, including witness interview notes.”
There was more, in Berman’s blowout 40-page decision. To sum up, Goodell and Goodell’s NFL blatantly misrepresented the findings of the Wells Report — submitted by independent investigator Ted Wells — never communicated the punishment that Brady would face, relied on the already-discredited technique of punishment for non-co-operation, and refused to let Brady have access to materials to defend himself.
Other than that, ol’ Rog nailed this bad boy to the wall. It’s astounding how clumsy it was, really. It reminded one of the way FIFA stopped even pretending not to be corrupt, before the FBI raids and whatnot.
It is hard to lose this badly when you’re a $10-billion-a-year business, but Goodell is probably getting used to it. He has had suspensions over Bountygate, Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson reduced or eliminated in the past few years — and then came Brady.
It’s one thing to try to drop the hammer on one of your most recognizable and popular players using dubious science, false media leaks and an investigation that the judge would eventually refer to as “independent” the way you refer to your Uncle Leroy at Thanksgiving as “sober.”
It’s another to screw it up this badly. Now, this wasn’t a ruling on whether Brady and the two sincesuspended Patriots employees conspired to illegally under-inflate footballs: this was a ruling on how Goodell applied the collective bargaining agreement.
So it’s still a mystery why, say, Patriots equipment manager Jim McNally spent one minute and 40 seconds in a bathroom with the footballs before the AFC Championship game and then told investigators he was using the urinal in there, which would have been more plausible had the room actually contained a urinal.
I wonder if McNally, who called himself The Deflator in those text messages, ever lost all that weight.
But I really think we need to appreciate the core incompetence of Roger Goodell here. Goodell negotiated a CBA in which he had thunderous authority, heard the appeal himself, and his league picked the court in which this case would be heard.
And he still hit a banana peel. Roger Goodell is the cop who thinks you might be guilty — and hey, you may well be — but when he can’t prove it, he plants evidence and lies about your testimony, only he leaves his phone and car keys at the scene of the crime. Alleged crime, anyway.
Now, Roger Goodell should be fired, but we’ve said that before. He survived Ray Rice, and we still don’t know which NFL employee saw the Rice tape and then called The Associated Press to talk about it. Now, Brady and his guys may well have cheated. It may have mattered, at some point. It could have been going on for years.
But the NFL couldn’t prove it, and fell on its face trying. On the plus side, this really overshadowed the week they had in Washington, where the other NFL coaches told the Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman they thought coach Jay Gruden intentionally left former franchise quarterback Robert Griffin III in a pre-season game to get concussed, and then the wife of the team’s general manager asked a female ESPN reporter over Twitter how much fellatio she had to give to report something, deleted the tweet, after which team denied it was a real account right up until she apologized for it. Washington, man. But Roger Goodell didn’t lose on Thursday, not really. Thursday, Peter King of Sports Illustrated said on Pardon The Interruption that 90 per cent of NFL owners remain on Goodell’s side. Goodell is only a creation and a creature of those 32 owners. Never forget that.
No, the NFL was humiliated, exposed as an incompetent and vindictive hive, and it lost. But as Cleveland offensive lineman Joe Thomas told ESPN’s Pat McManamon not long ago, it won, too. It can’t help it.
“I’m not sure if (Goodell) realizes what he’s doing is brilliant, but what he’s doing is brilliant because he’s made the NFL relevant 365 (days a year) by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,” Thomas said. “It’s made the game more popular than ever and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business and it’s making so much money.”
Season starts next week. Tom Brady will be there. Everybody wins.