Make no mistake about it: Roger Goodell picked this fight.
The terms were his. The stakes were his. The decision to turn it into an all-or-nothing battle between the National Football League and its most famous player, plus one of its most powerful owners, was his alone.
It doesn’t matter if the league somehow triumphs down the road on legal grounds, if an appeal judge decides that the powers invested in the commissioner under the league’s contract with its players allow him to operate a kangaroo court with impunity.
Goodell has already pushed all of his chips to the middle of the table, and really, it is hard to imagine now how he remains in the game, how his employers can retain faith in his leadership.
Let’s back up for a moment.
A reasonable person might still conclude that Tom Brady, quarterback of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, certain Hall of Famer, on a very short list of the greatest to have ever played that all important position, has a preference for throwing footballs that are inflated slightly below the league’s approved PSI parameters. For a layman, it’s near impossible to understand what that might actually mean in terms of a competitive advantage, but let’s go way out on a limb and suggest: not much. Other quarterbacks apparently prefer the opposite. It’s a comfort thing.
That said, rules are rules. They’re there for a reason. And of course all of this plays out against the history of a franchise that has a well-earned reputation for going to edge of what’s allowed and occasionally beyond in the interests of winning football games. It’s no surprise that another team raised the red flag here. Lose to the Pats often enough, and it probably isn’t hard to buy into conspiracies.
Then there is one side of those text conversations between Brady and two team employees, which certainly seemed to suggest that the balls had been tampered with at the quarterback’s behest. And Brady’s destruction of his own cell phone in the midst of the investigation. Why would an innocent man do that?
So put two and two and two together, and extrapolate a little, and you have Tom Brady, cheater, though it was a stretch to conclude that the cheating made all that much of a difference, let alone to compare it to the use of performance enhancing drugs, as the league did when handing down its punishment. And none of the above — never mind the fact that the league had no unequivocal scientific evidence that the balls used by the Patriots in the AFC title game were actually softer than the legal limit — added up to anything like an airtight legal case.
Under its collective agreement negotiated with the players, the commissioner acts as judge, jury, appellate judge and executioner. But the flaws in that system during Goodell’s reign have become all too evident — his Bountygate, Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice rulings all later knocked down. In his rush to judgment, in his increasingly desperate attempts to demonstrate his all-encompassing authority over the players, Goodell was sloppy, he was inconsistent, he was knee jerk, he ran roughshod over procedure, he missed crossing t’s and dotting i’s and he got it wrong, again and again and again.
Somehow — and this certainly speaks to his personality, not to mention his competence — that did not make him gun shy. It did not cause him to step back and re-evaluate. Instead, he became more determined than ever to bring down the hammer and prove that he was in charge. What better way to do that than to take on the NFL’s golden boy, and to take on Robert Kraft, who during debacles past had been one of Goodell’s most loyal supporters?
The league’s internal investigation, performed by Ted Wells, was revealed to the press and public as though it were the great, gotcha moment, leaked in a way as to maximize Brady’s embarrassment, though on actually reading it, you realized that they didn’t quite have the goods.
If Brady accepted those findings at face value and acknowledged his guilt, they’d knock the four game suspension down a notch or two. Otherwise, see you in court, where the players retained the right to appeal league discipline, though only on narrow, legal grounds. The league even got to pick where the case would be heard.
What an arrogant, ill-conceived, bizarre gambit.
Following the case as it unfolded, the judge provided hint after hint that he thought a settlement was the best course. He made no secret of the fact that he thought the league’s case against Brady was procedurally flawed — the only grounds under which he could overturn the suspension. That left Goodell with but one leg to stand on — the all powerful authority of the Commissioner of the National Football League as defined by the collective agreement, the argument that it didn’t really matter about the fine points, about due process, about fairness, because in the end what he said was the law of the game, period.
The judge didn’t buy that. Perhaps another judge will when the league’s appeal is heard. But the damage to Goodell has already been done.
He may still find cover behind The Shield. But everyone can see that the emperor has no clothes.