RobZagnut wrote:If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, destroys its cell phone before info can be retrieved like a duck, it's a duck.
Brady is pulling a Clemens/Bonds. Everyone knows they did it, but they have money to fight the fight.
They totally did it, and yet, the penalties are completely out of scale, and the investigation is incompetent. Loss of a 1st and 4th round pick is already way, way more than this deserves.
Teams get up to all sort of nonsense. This was a non-issue and was going to stay that way until the Ravens and Colts got butthurt from getting beat. Harbaugh cried about our formations like a bitch, and when Brady told him to check the rule book, he decided to stick it to him via the Colts, who ran to the league with it prior to the AFC Championship Game.
Any reasonable organization tells both teams leading up to that game that they will be checking ball pressure and just squash that right there, yet the NFL can't even tell you which gauge they used to measure the balls pregame.
Colts give a ball to the league in a game they got annihilated in, and then ex-Jet league office stoolies with an axe to grind spend the next two weeks leaking inaccurate information to the press, compelling the league to come down hard on a molehill of an infraction. They commission a report that, surprise, reaches their pre-determined conclusions, which they then edit before releasing, and come down hard on both Brady and the team as a make-up call for completely screwing up the Ray Rice scandal (who the Ravens lied way worse about, FWIW).
Way, way too hard, in fact. If Brady had punched the air out of those footballs in an Atlantic City elevator, they would have helped him cover it up, then had ESPN suspend anyone who called them out on it.
And because Goodell is too weak to manage his axe-grinding underlings from overstepping in the investigation and penalty phase, and too week to reduce the suspension to something more in scale with the largely unproven and unprovable crime, he's letting the court system do it for him, while he hides behind this narrative of a destroyed PRIVATE cell phone all parties, including his own investigators, agreed the submitting of was unnecessary and unwarranted.
Whole thing is ridiculous. Should have fined both Pats and the Brady $250k and maybe docked a 4th rounder. Still would have been way out of scale with similar infractions by other players and other teams. As someone who knows he did it and who would have accepted a reasonable penalty, it's really a black eye to how the NFL does business under Goodell. No rhyme or reason, no consistency, nothing but a completely arbitrary kangaroo court.
Oh, and **** ESPN for carrying their cash cow's water on this too, despite the glaring weaknesses of the investigation all along.