JUDGE DEFLATES COMMISH’S CREDIBILITY
If Roger Goodell were an NFL quarterback, he’d be cut this week, after his lamest in a long string of wild incompletions.
If he were an NFL head coach, he’d be getting fired, after his worst of an embarrassing string of crushing losses.
But he’s the NFL commissioner, and despite his biggest bungle to date — Deflategate — he’s not going anywhere.
A federal court judge vacated Tom Brady’s f our- game suspension Thursday, citing “several significant legal deficiencies” and accusing Goodell of dispensing “his own brand of industrial justice.”
Apparently, no matter how many times Goodell drops the ball on a suspension, or gets his butt kicked by a judge, owners will keep on loving him. For making them so much money. That’s why they’ve made him the highest-paid man in the history of American football. They gave ol’ Rodge $44 million in 2012 and $35 million in 2013. (The league has since punted its tax-exempt status, so his annual pay remains private.)
But whatever he’s paid, Goodell isn’t earning it. His decisions on player and team discipline — one of his primary job functions — are farther off the mark than the average Tim Tebow pass.
Deflategate is only the most recent and egregious example.
Remember what ultimately happened with his Bountygate suspensions three years ago? Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, overturned his suspensions of four New Orleans Saints players implicated in the illegal cash-for-hits program.
Similarly, Goodell’s second, indefinite suspension of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice last fall was vacated by a federal court judge, as was his suspension of Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson.
Judge Richard Berman, in his 40-page ruling vacating Brady’s suspension, described as “fundamentally unfair” Goodell’s refusal to allow NFL chief counsel and co-lead Deflategate investigator, Jeff Pash, to be questioned by the NFLPA at the June appeal hearing.
Perhaps the most inexplicable and appalling thing about this Deflategate saga is it was so easily avoidable in the first place.
The day before the AFC title game in question, the NFL received a tip from the Indianapolis Colts that the Patriots might try to purposely deflate their footballs. Sometimes the NFL takes such information and warns the fingered team. Not this time.
As physics experts have told me, some of the scientific conclusions reached — and scientific evidence ignored — in the report from co-lead investigator Ted Wells were stunningly wrong.
Similarly, the conclusion that Brady was “more likely than not” to be at least “generally aware” of a scheme by Patriots equipment handlers to deflate their team’s footballs was dubious.
Brady and Patriots haters point to the private cellphone texts of two equipment handlers — when one called the other “the deflator” — as proof it all happened.
The NFL’s insistence on persecuting the Patriots and Brady without proper evidence might stand as the dumbest decision by a major American business since Coca-Cola replaced Coke with New Coke.
Unlike the classic soft drink, Goodell still needs a new recipe.