Brady out 4 games
- Thread starter andynap
- Start date
If an appeal involves real evidence Brady will not appeal.
KevinS
Senior Insider
Vikings-Panthers game ball warming. This was done in full view of a national TV audience (although probably not a big one). The balls never took a bathroom break and there were no denials issued. Both teams and the rest of the league received a reminder that this is not allowed.
Bucs scuffing balls. Is this related to Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003? It gained notoriety this year after the incident involving the Patriots. QB Brad Johnson admitted that he did "tip" ball boys to scuff the balls when the issue was brought up this year.
Colts pumping noise. Is this related to the allegation raised by the Patriots in 2007? The NFL cleared the Colts after CBS informed the NFL that an unusual "audio moment" heard during a broadcast was the result of tape feedback in the CBS production truck. Raven coach John Harbaugh made a reference to noise pumping this past year when he stated "Rumor has it, they pipe crowd noise in there....That's the rumor. Sorry, Chuck" referencing Chuck Pagano, his former D coordinator Indy Head coach. The Falcons were the team cited for pumping crowd noise this year. Owner Arthur Blank admitted what went on and the team took responsibility. Said Blank "I think what we've done in 2013 and 2014 was wrong. Anything that affects the competitive balance and fairness on the field, we're opposed to, as a league, as a club and as an owner. It's obviously embarrassing but beyond embarrassing it doesn't represent our culture and what we're about". The Falcons fired the director of event marketing who was directly responsible - the NFL stated that he would have been suspended without pay for the first eight weeks of the 2015 regular season if he had not been fired. Penalties to the Falcons included forfeiture of its highest fifth-round pick in the 2016 draft and suspension of team President Rich McKay from his position as chairman of the Competition Committee.
Now these guys know how to pump crowd noise:
MIke R
Senior Insider
you wanna really laugh ....fans have started a GoFundMe account to pay the million dollar fine for the Pats
idiots
This morning on the Dan Sileo show (radio 1090 in SD), he said that Troy Aikman used to scrape down the balls out of the box and every other quarterback did something to make them less slippery. Dan played on that team with him, so I guess he knows. Just saying that it is common practice, not judging as to its fairness or appropriateness. Nothing new under the sun. So Tom will pay a little less in taxes this year. It's obviously a slow time for NFL news. In other news, Michigan got a great 5 star basketball prospect, Tyus Battle!! Go Blue!
MIke R
Senior Insider
Good article.....this writer gets it
Deflategate punishments are NFL’s weak attempts to right its own wrongs
The Washington Post
Sally Jenkins5 hrs ago
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© The Washington Post How does Tom Brady's four-game suspension for "Deflategate" affect his legacy? And what does the punishment mean for the New England Patriots' upcoming season? The Post's Adam…The evidence is thoroughly equivocal and the competitive advantage is nowhere to be found, yet the NFL is punishing Tom Brady and the New England Patriots as if they belong in Sing Sing. This case, perhaps more than all the others in the past year, sums up the NFL approach to justice: If you crack down hard enough on the little things, no one will notice the real scoundreling.
The NFL chose the wrong case to throw a book at, but then, the league is always far more worried more about appearances than reality. So Brady gets a four-game suspension for undermining “the public confidence” in the NFL over an esoteric and unproven matter of air, and his team is stripped of draft choices and $1 million. I see. And what is Roger Goodell’s punishment for turning the entire moral underpinning of the league into sand? The NFL is so desperate to look like a rock of integrity after a year of truly damaging scandals that it has ginned up a case out of literally . . . nothing. A few whiffs of PSI.
DeflateGate would be more of a ‘Gate’ if the league had proven that the balls were in fact deflated. But they haven’t. That’s what is so peculiar about this entire deal. The Ted Wells report commissioned by the league is perfectly clear on this point: No one is sure which of two gauges were used to check the pressurization of the balls. The gauges gave significantly different readings; one read much higher than the other and showed the balls were legally inflated. The referee in charge of checking the footballs, Walt Anderson, is pretty sure he used this gauge. Yet the NFL disregarded this critical point — and the testimony of their own official. Nevertheless the NFL decided the “preponderance of the evidence” showed Brady and the Patriots manipulated the game balls. That’s how eager they are to find wrongdoing.
Even harder to find is evidence of any actual harm: The Patriots won the AFC championship game, 45-7. In the first half, with the supposedly softer spheroids, Brady completed just 11 of 21 passes with an interception. In the second half, when everyone agrees the game balls were fully pressurized by the reading of any gauge, the Patriots scored four touchdowns and ran away with the game.
Did Brady attempt to influence how much air was in the ball? Sure. Every quarterback in the league is princess-and-the-pea sensitive to the texture and grip of the ball in his hand, and asks equipment managers to inflate them to their preference. If you dock Brady four games, then you have to dock Aaron Rodgers, too. Rodgers admitted to CBS analyst Phil Simms last season that he “pushes the limit” on how much air is in the ball. Rodgers has large hands and likes an extremely hard ball. He told Simms that he tells his equipment guys to “even go over what they allow you to do and see if the officials take the air out of it.” Simms reported this on national television, and no one called it a ‘Gate’ — for the simple reason that it’s not cheating. It’s a preference. And it comes with an equalizing downside. If a softer ball is easier to grip, it also decelerates when you throw it, loses velocity and doesn’t travel as far. If it’s overinflated the way Rodgers likes it, then it travels farther, faster.
You want a scandal? Greg Hardy. The defensive end has been caught brutalizing his ex-girlfriend four times. For this, he has been docked just 10 games. Brady gets four games for a whiff of air. Hardy gets 10 games, and a new contract with the Dallas Cowboys, for serial beatings.
This how it goes in Roger Goodell’s NFL. They throw the book at marijuana tokers to distract from the abominable abuses of NFL doctors when it comes to painkillers. And they throw the book at Brady and the Patriots to rescue the commissioner’s authority after a long hard year during which he misapplied his power in cases of domestic violence and child abuse.
Brady is the league’s attempt to reestablish control over disciplinary issues after the Ray Rice fiasco. The commissioner badly compromised the league by giving Rice just two games for socking his wife when he thought no one was looking. But when a video went viral and it turned out everyone was looking, he made the suspension indefinite, and tried to make it seem like Rice lied to him. A former judge later found Goodell not credible and ruled that he “abused his discretion” in his handling of Rice’s case.
As Brady’s agent Don Yee told Fox Sports, “The NFL has a well-documented history of making poor disciplinary decisions that are often overturned when truly independent and neutral judges or arbitrators preside, and a former federal judge has found the commissioner has abused his discretion in the past.”
That’s the real root of this matter: The authority of the commissioner’s office has been badly weakened. The players union is lobbying hard to have discipline removed from league office hands and placed into those of a neutral arbitrator. This only makes sense. The owners pay for Goodell’s whopping salary and this creates a basic conflict of interest. The commissioner is eager to preserve his power. But you don’t establish your authority by handing down a phony hanging-judge sentence in a case that doesn’t merit it. All that does is erode “public confidence” even further.
Deflategate punishments are NFL’s weak attempts to right its own wrongs
The Washington Post
Sally Jenkins5 hrs ago
The NFL chose the wrong case to throw a book at, but then, the league is always far more worried more about appearances than reality. So Brady gets a four-game suspension for undermining “the public confidence” in the NFL over an esoteric and unproven matter of air, and his team is stripped of draft choices and $1 million. I see. And what is Roger Goodell’s punishment for turning the entire moral underpinning of the league into sand? The NFL is so desperate to look like a rock of integrity after a year of truly damaging scandals that it has ginned up a case out of literally . . . nothing. A few whiffs of PSI.
DeflateGate would be more of a ‘Gate’ if the league had proven that the balls were in fact deflated. But they haven’t. That’s what is so peculiar about this entire deal. The Ted Wells report commissioned by the league is perfectly clear on this point: No one is sure which of two gauges were used to check the pressurization of the balls. The gauges gave significantly different readings; one read much higher than the other and showed the balls were legally inflated. The referee in charge of checking the footballs, Walt Anderson, is pretty sure he used this gauge. Yet the NFL disregarded this critical point — and the testimony of their own official. Nevertheless the NFL decided the “preponderance of the evidence” showed Brady and the Patriots manipulated the game balls. That’s how eager they are to find wrongdoing.
Even harder to find is evidence of any actual harm: The Patriots won the AFC championship game, 45-7. In the first half, with the supposedly softer spheroids, Brady completed just 11 of 21 passes with an interception. In the second half, when everyone agrees the game balls were fully pressurized by the reading of any gauge, the Patriots scored four touchdowns and ran away with the game.
Did Brady attempt to influence how much air was in the ball? Sure. Every quarterback in the league is princess-and-the-pea sensitive to the texture and grip of the ball in his hand, and asks equipment managers to inflate them to their preference. If you dock Brady four games, then you have to dock Aaron Rodgers, too. Rodgers admitted to CBS analyst Phil Simms last season that he “pushes the limit” on how much air is in the ball. Rodgers has large hands and likes an extremely hard ball. He told Simms that he tells his equipment guys to “even go over what they allow you to do and see if the officials take the air out of it.” Simms reported this on national television, and no one called it a ‘Gate’ — for the simple reason that it’s not cheating. It’s a preference. And it comes with an equalizing downside. If a softer ball is easier to grip, it also decelerates when you throw it, loses velocity and doesn’t travel as far. If it’s overinflated the way Rodgers likes it, then it travels farther, faster.
You want a scandal? Greg Hardy. The defensive end has been caught brutalizing his ex-girlfriend four times. For this, he has been docked just 10 games. Brady gets four games for a whiff of air. Hardy gets 10 games, and a new contract with the Dallas Cowboys, for serial beatings.
This how it goes in Roger Goodell’s NFL. They throw the book at marijuana tokers to distract from the abominable abuses of NFL doctors when it comes to painkillers. And they throw the book at Brady and the Patriots to rescue the commissioner’s authority after a long hard year during which he misapplied his power in cases of domestic violence and child abuse.
Brady is the league’s attempt to reestablish control over disciplinary issues after the Ray Rice fiasco. The commissioner badly compromised the league by giving Rice just two games for socking his wife when he thought no one was looking. But when a video went viral and it turned out everyone was looking, he made the suspension indefinite, and tried to make it seem like Rice lied to him. A former judge later found Goodell not credible and ruled that he “abused his discretion” in his handling of Rice’s case.
As Brady’s agent Don Yee told Fox Sports, “The NFL has a well-documented history of making poor disciplinary decisions that are often overturned when truly independent and neutral judges or arbitrators preside, and a former federal judge has found the commissioner has abused his discretion in the past.”
That’s the real root of this matter: The authority of the commissioner’s office has been badly weakened. The players union is lobbying hard to have discipline removed from league office hands and placed into those of a neutral arbitrator. This only makes sense. The owners pay for Goodell’s whopping salary and this creates a basic conflict of interest. The commissioner is eager to preserve his power. But you don’t establish your authority by handing down a phony hanging-judge sentence in a case that doesn’t merit it. All that does is erode “public confidence” even further.
Tom hired Jeffrey Kessler today... Tom has the money... and has history with armed bodyguards... so play that Zevon song...
Dear Tom..."you are suspended without pay for your club's first four games of the 2015 regular season"...
From US News:
"Sure, owner Robert Kraft will have to pay a $1 million fine. But the team would also save four of Brady's game checks, which are $470,588.23 for each week of the 17-week season — about $1.88 million.
Even better: The Patriots get a salary cap credit for the money they don't have to pay Brady, according to the players' union. Some of that will have to go to the player who replaces the three-time Super Bowl MVP on the roster. But the team could spend the rest of it elsewhere, perhaps on a cornerback to bolster its secondary for the entire season.
Player fines go to charity, but the $1 million from the Patriots will go into the NFL coffers to be distributed on a case-by-case basis. Look for it to pay for part of the probe, which lead investigator Ted Wells said on Tuesday cost "in the millions of dollars."
x
Mike Kensil has been at the center of Patriot conspiracy theories since early on, well summarized here and here. He is NFL VP of game operations who was a J-E-T-S exec when Belichick stiffed the team and is said to hold a grudge... Patriots have leaked that Kensil told the Pats' equipment manager Dave Schoenfield at halftime of the Indy game: “We weighed the balls. You are in big f—ing trouble"...
MIke R
Senior Insider
My question is ..........
if the NFL knew about alleged Patriot ball tampering before the Indy game, as they are claiming .......why not, for the good of the game, approach the Patriot organization before the game and verbalize their concerns?.......rather than do what appears to be a grudge fueled sting operation, which of course creates one more black mark on the same integrity of the game they are claiming to be concerned about?
if the NFL knew about alleged Patriot ball tampering before the Indy game, as they are claiming .......why not, for the good of the game, approach the Patriot organization before the game and verbalize their concerns?.......rather than do what appears to be a grudge fueled sting operation, which of course creates one more black mark on the same integrity of the game they are claiming to be concerned about?
