Tom Brady and the “Deflategate” saga have received plenty of attention over the past year and a half. I even wrote about it last September; like many others, I was completely and unequivocally done with the Deflategate story at that point. If you told me that we’d have to go through another ten months of it after the United States District Court reversal of his four-game suspension last year, I would have politely informed you that you were insane.
Yet here we are, and there really isn’t an end in sight. Today, the 2nd Circuit United States Court of Appeals denied Brady’s request for a rehearing of the case. In case you’re new to this story (God love you if you are), the 2nd Circuit Court overturned the District Court’s, and Judge Richard Berman’s, decision to overturn Brady’s original suspension. Brady and his legal team appealed for a rehearing of the case and now we’re here.
But with all of that decided and well out of the way, Brady still has one legal move left. If you guessed that his last move would be to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, you would be correct. Yes, our long national nightmare of under-inflated footballs, circumstantial evidence, and weight loss is about to reach the highest court in the land. Move over Marbury v. Madison, Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe v. Wade, and McCullogh v. Maryland. We may now have the most famous (or infamous) Supreme Court Case ever: Tom Brady v. the NFL, or something like that.
Many, including myself, will probably die from laughter if this case reaches the Supreme Court. But this is the question we must all ask ourselves: why are we still dealing with this? And why did the NFL decide it was a good idea to go after Brady the way it did, especially when the league has other, far bigger, problems to address?
As for the first question, we are still dealing with this story because of the collective greed of Brady and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Both parties have wanted to maintain their integrity throughout this laughable process, even as courts have ruled one way or another and the affairs of the matter have become increasingly complicated. It’s no secret that Goodell, in particular, has taken measures to increase and fortify his power over the course of his tenure as NFL commissioner; the most infamous of these measures was a change to the league’s Personal Conduct Policy that gave the commish more wide-ranging authority to levy discipline on players, coaches, and teams.
However, it’s also true that the Players’ Association had the opportunity to check Goodell’s power during the negotiations of the Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2011 (hint: they didn’t exactly do that). They were more interested in returning to the field before the start of the season, which was more than understandable at the time, but they also made a very large concession to get the agreement done.
That can’t be forgotten here: the same players complaining about Goddell’s despotic power are the ones who signed off on the CBA that enabled it five years ago. While we can all agree that Goodell has far too much power and has abused it on more than one occasion, the players who were involved in that negotiation have no right to gripe after the fact. They had the chance to make Goodell relinquish at least some of his authority, and they completely blew it. That’s on them, not the league.
And now we move on to the matter of Brady and the New England Patriots. The exact reason why Brady was originally suspended was because of the use of under-inflated footballs in the 2015 AFC Championship game. The balls were found to be under the 11 to 12 PSI that the league requires of its regulation footballs. Almost immediately after the game, the league launched an “independent investigation” into the events of that game and how the game balls ended up how they were. I air-quote the words independent investigation because while the NFL claims it really was independent, it also paid Wells lots and lots of money to conduct the investigation. To me, that’s not really independent at all.
But, much more importantly, why is the NFL so concerned with Brady when it has far bigger issues? For example, recently-retired wide receiver Calvin Johnson admitted that doctors would distribute painkillers in the locker room “like candy”. It’s generally a bad idea to treat Vicodin and Percocet the same way you would Sour Patch Kids, but that’s just a rule of thumb. Anyway, the league is also engrossed in other issues such as quality of play, what to do with the Pro Bowl, and, of course, player safety.
And then there’s this obvious issue: did Tom Brady and the Patriots definitively and knowingly do anything wrong? While it is plausible that Brady knew of the deflation of the footballs, we can’t conclude that for sure. Even the Wells Report admitted that it was “more probable than not” that two equipment officials tampered with the game balls in a deliberate manner. The report also stated that Brady was more likely than not “generally aware” of the process of the deflation.
This, though, is far from a definitive statement and it leaves room for much speculation on what actually happened on January 18, 2015. For example, how can we know for sure if Brady knew about the tampering of the game equipment? And how can we be 100% sure that no external, natural forces such as weather meddled with the footballs?
There are many questions that are still, even 18 months later, left unanswered. I’ll give you my opinion: I think Brady is innocent of guilt. I don’t necessarily feel sorry for him but I believe he is innocent based on reasonable doubt. We can’t prove for sure that he fully knew of what was going on. In my book, if he was not fully aware and there is no concrete link between him and the equipment officials, the NFL has no right to suspend him.
He really was witch-hunted in this case; the NFL decided to make an example out of him when it had much bigger issues to deal with. However, it probably won’t go away anytime soon, nor will our fascination with it. We can’t seem to stop talking about it and it looks like we’ll pay close attention to the case until the very bitter end. Our country seems to love obsessing with certain things; after all, the New York Times just released this article about how we can use Pokemon Go, the latest app craze, as a personal tour guide. All you need to know about Pokemon Go is that it is an addiction, one we’re hooked to and won’t be getting off of anytime soon.
We’re hooked to Pokemon Go in the same way we’re hooked to Deflategate. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take 18 months for Pokemon Go to, well, go. Away.
And let’s hope Deflategate goes away, too. My bet is that it won’t anytime soon.