http://mmqb.si.com/2015/05/13/tom-brady-deflategate-robert-kraft-roger-goodell/
Brandon Wade/AP
It’s the New Discipline
Why the NFL came down hard on the Pats, what it means for Roger Goodell to potentially lose a powerful ally in Robert Kraft, and the impact on Tom Brady’s legacy
By Andrew Brandt
The Deflategate saga that began on an unseasonably warm January day in Foxborough four months ago has reached a flashpoint with discipline announced for the Patriots and Tom Brady. The story is not over yet, however, with expected appeals stretching for weeks, if not months (perhaps even years), with continued aftershocks beyond that.
PRV (Post-Rice Video) Era
As to my reaction to the discipline,
I predicted four games for Brady last week but am surprised by the loss of a first-round draft pick, truly valuable currency in NFL inventory. The NFL has become enamored with enhanced discipline when a “pattern of behavior” exists, and that affected the Patriots. Just as Roger Goodell has used that standard in player conduct discipline, he is using it with organizations, holding the past transgression of Spygate against Robert Kraft and his franchise.
To me, however, there is another reason for harsh discipline. Timing matters, nothing happens in a vacuum and we are now living in the PRV (Post-Rice Video) era in the NFL. The league was shamed and embarrassed at the under-punishment of Rice, since corrected, and seems intent on going the other way.
Adrian Peterson was indefinitely suspended after a plea bargain to a misdemeanor; Greg Hardy received a 10-game suspension despite having charges against him vacated; Browns general manager Ray Farmer received a four-game suspension for texting messages to the sideline; Falcons president Rich McKay was disciplined for piped-in crowd noise despite having no knowledge of the transgression. We are in a new era of NFL discipline; punishments are coming at the player, executive and organizational levels.
Defiance discipline
Although the penalties are not apportioned, it seems clear that a significant share of discipline—to both Brady and the Patriots—is attributed to lack of cooperation and noncompliance with the investigators.
While Tom Brady answered questions from investigators, he did not turn over communications from his phone and other devices, information that could have been central to the inquiry. Many, including Brady’s attorney Don Yee, have emphasized that Brady should not trust the NFL with his phone, even if properly vetted to exclude personal information.
However, Ted Wells, in a rare explanation of his methods in response to Yee’s accusations, set the record straight there: Brady was never asked to surrender his phone, only for Yee to submit printouts of relevant communications with Patriots staffers (a request that was denied). That changes the narrative a bit.
Were I investigating Brady and heard a forceful denial, I would have simply said
I believe you Tom, just let me see copies of your communications with those guys so I can check the box. Certainly, without any subpoena power, Brady and his legal team were within their rights to refuse, but they had to know there could be consequences. Right or wrong, the NFL treats the failure to cooperate as a misdeed on equal footing to any skirting of the rules.
And, it would seem, Brady’s lack of cooperation entered the calculus of penalties against the Patriots. When these investigations are commissioned—whether it’s the Wells Report with the Dolphins, the Wells Report with the Patriots, the Mueller Report with the NFL—employees take their cues from above. While the investigators cannot force testimony, a directive from the top—whether from Steve Ross, Roger Goodell or Robert Kraft—to cooperate would certainly carry weight. Judging from Brady’s intransigence, that did not happen here.
Brady laughed off questions about tampering with footballs from the start of the inquiry; Kraft demanded an apology before the investigation even began. It is hard to believe those attitudes did not figure into the discipline.
Hindsight is 20/20, but if Tom Brady had come out right away and said
Yes, I like the pressure on the low side, but I realize we went south of that on a few balls; my fault. we would have had a much different offseason. The defiance, the lack of cooperation and the scorched earth attitude from the agent have not helped his—or the Patriots’—cause.
In 25 years of experience on different sides of the NFL, I never had a single conversation about football pressure until January. In the scheme of things, it is not a big deal. What is a big deal, however, is a dismissive attitude towards evidence of a ball-tampering scheme that may have been going on for years, and a lack of cooperation with an investigation trying to ferret out the truth. The punishment was to Brady and the Patriots, but the message was sent to all team owners and executives:
If your integrity is in question, show and tell us why it should not be.
Relationship strained
I have spoken often of the professional and personal relationship between Goodell and Kraft, with one team president I know calling Kraft the “Senior Commissioner.” Goodell has obviously strained that relationship, yet in doing so may have strengthened other relationships among his constituency.
Many eyes around the league were watching Deflategate play out; now many sit in smug satisfaction as the Patriots, seen as always pushing to the competitive edge (and sometimes beyond), lick their wounds. Let’s not be naïve: the NFL trades on political investments, and Goodell just made a major deposit with several relationships while risking one, albeit an important one.
Next steps, Brady’s legacy
Brady will certainly appeal, with the assistance of attorney Jeffrey Kessler, the NFL’s nemesis in player misconduct hearings and lawsuits. Kessler will certainly start with a vehement demand for an independent arbitrator, which will be denied by—you guessed it—Goodell (it doesn’t hurt to ask). And while Goodell, in my opinion, will not take the role of appeal hearing officer himself, he will designate one of his league-affiliated hearing officers, such as longtime NFL attorney Harold Henderson, rather than someone truly independent. Assuming Goodell uses such an arbitrator, if the result does not suit Brady, Kessler may repeat his (successful) strategy used with Adrian Peterson and take the matter to federal court. Buckle up.
Speaking of lawyers, before the penalties were announced Kraft had taken a tone of acceptance. Now, he seems to be cryptically suggesting that he may pursue legal action against his (former) friend. In the end, however, I think Kraft will accept the penalties and move on rather than go through not weeks, not months, but years of litigation ahead. If people think the Wells investigation took a long time, that was a sprint compared to the marathon of an antitrust trial.
Finally, as to the notion of Tom Brady’s legacy… I think legacy is something personal for each of us. For me, I have less of a problem with Brady tinkering with air pressure of footballs than I do with his feigning ignorance about the rules and his relationship—or professed lack thereof—with the “Deflator” Jim McNally.
http://mmqb.si.com/2015/05/13/nfl-deflategate-tom-brady-new-england-patriots-roger-goodell/
Al Tielemans and Erick W. Rasco for Sports Illustrated/The MMQB
Memo to NFL Fans and the League Office: Put Your Pitchforks Away
Patriots fans, reel in your paranoia complex. Roger Goodell and the NFL office, scale back on the God complex. Deflategate is the ultimate judgment call, and no one is embracing the nuances of a complicated, murky case
By Don Banks
It’s true, the NFL has never been more popular. Or more utterly polarized.
Deflategate and its messy fallout have reminded us once again that there are two—and only two—sides to every story when it comes to the league’s ever-active crime and punishment front. There’s the perspective that says Team A or Player B (fill in the blanks based on the scandal du jour) is completely guilty and deserves the NFL’s version of the death penalty, and then there’s the contingent that’s completely convinced that Team A or Player B just suffered the biggest miscarriage of justice ever perpetrated against anyone, anywhere, with all that malice emanating from the hated league office.
In today’s voracious news cycle, the names, incidents and charges change with remarkable regularity. The scandals blow up, spark outrage, then fade away. But with each new saga that captivates 24/7 attention in the NFL, there are diametrically opposing viewpoints and interpretations of facts that seemingly keep moving further and further away from each other, with both sides well practiced in divorcing reality to cultivate their favored narrative.
By now, it’s a proven mathematical equation. Sports have become just like a political debate: You have to be 100 percent wrong in order for me to be 100 percent right. And I think it was Newton who first discovered that the world is divided equally among Patriots haters and Patriots zealots. At least when you round the percentages.
Why must every high-profile issue involving the NFL be a zero-sum game? All semblance of middle ground has been obliterated by scorched-earth debate. Just look at Deflategate and how the opposing camps are trying to sell versions of the truth that are as different as black and white.
Either the Patriots are the biggest and most proven cheats the NFL has ever seen, and Tom Brady and his smug friends definitely had it coming in terms of the league’s sweeping penalties, or that All-American boy named Tom and his dynastic Pats are the most victimized and persecuted champions in the history of pro sports, drawing all this unfair scrutiny out of sheer jealousy and spite. Because the Patriots win too much, people naturally root against them the way people once hated the British Empire—and how’s that for an analogy rich with irony?
From the minute this saga began, it was clearly going to be a very tricky story featuring a boatload of gray. So many shades, in fact, that it took league-hired investigator Ted Wells more than 100 days to try to make some sense of it. Let’s face it, the facts in this drama are complicated. The science was more than a bit murky and completely foreign to most of us initially, Bill Belichick included.
The chronology of when the Colts first complained and had issues with alleged ball deflation were confusing, and the competitive edge provided by having less air in a game ball still remains altogether difficult to quantify. No matter where your starting point of assumption was in reading the costly and long-anticipated Wells Report, the operative words were ultimately “circumstantial evidence.” Whether that was enough to prove your view of the case or not.
Who does nuance anymore? It’s much easier to boil complex issues down to a point-counterpoint cliché that goes something like this: The Patriots cheated, they always do. Case closed. Or New England and Brady were railroaded by a league office that didn’t have definitive proof, but decided strong suspicion was good enough to hand down some serious punishment, especially after so much time and effort had been spent on the investigation.
Worse, the prism through which people saw this story barely budged over the past three-plus months. People knew what they knew, and it was either “in Tom We Trust,’’ or it was “about time they caught those frauds in Foxboro.” One side sees the Patriots as a team of pros, and the other as a team of cons.
But getting locked into those two divergent reactions—or roles, if you will—made a lot of people sound as if they had absolutely no room for reason in this debate. And this story is, in essence, the ultimate judgment call, requiring a little bit of trust being placed in somebody, or some body.
Patriots fans, it’s time to reel in your well developed paranoia complex and your heartfelt belief that Wells was merely doing the bidding of an NFL office looking to hammer your ultra-successful team, as well as one of the game’s greatest stars and ambassadors.
Roger Goodell might well have eagerly taken the opportunity to show he doesn’t play favorites by doling out harsh penalties to Robert Kraft’s team, but he didn’t make up this entire tale out of whole cloth just to feel like he’s big and bad enough to be worth his eight-figure salary. So back off the sit-ins in the lobby of the league office, Patriots loyalists, and end that silly fund-raising drive to help Kraft scrape up enough for that $1 million fine. It makes you look like you’re due back on planet Earth anytime now.
As for Goodell and the NFL office, determined as they are to show resolve and toughness at every turn and fix every wrong with an iron fist, they would do well to seriously scale back on the God complex that has been crafted in recent years. What started out as Goodell wanting to restore some welcomed and needed attention to player conduct issues at the beginning of his tenure has morphed into a role in which he can’t possibly succeed.
The principal’s office can’t be crowded all the time, and Goodell needs to find a way to turn in his badge (sorry,
shield) and get out of the full-time policing business. If he keeps losing friends and allies at this rate, he’ll be down to a few extended family members who are non-football fans by 2016.
Deflategate isn’t over by a long shot, but the part of the story that featured only two firmly entrenched narratives should be. Neither side has ever owned a monopoly on the truth in this multilayered saga. And both would be smart to take a step back and recalibrate, realizing that a zero-sum game is usually a losing proposition.
