So today the U.S. Federal Judge Richard Berman sided with justice, fairness and common sense and slapped Roger Goodell and the NFL upside the head by vacating Tom Brady’s suspension. The Commissioner so thoroughly screwed this up I can’t figure out how he makes $30 million a year. This case was about a misuse or mishandling of equipment during a game and it was such a meaningless violation that no one recorded it properly, no one knew if it was intentional or if the pressure in a football could be affected by outside weather or air. It was so meaningless that the NFL had caught teams/players/staff doing similar things before and hadn’t even fined a player for it. Roger Goodell and the media then blew this up like it was the Watergate scandal (an actual scandal) and let it drag on for months. I guess I’m not surprised Roger can’t follow the rules because that’s what happens when you make them up as you go. Roger would have you believe that he suspended Tom Brady because he obstructed the investigation into this non-event yet in the past when Brett Favre sent lewd pictures to a woman and refused to turn over the evidence to the league Roger only fined him. Roger doesn’t seem to mind fining and suspending people when he has absolutely no evidence just ask anyone from New Orleans that eventually had their suspensions overturned during the whole bounty fiasco. Of course if there was video evidence of Tom Brady deflating the football by punching it in an elevator his suspension may have only been two games. Anyone that works in a field where you have to follow rules or enforce rules or laws knows that the biggest way you get yourself in trouble is not enforcing things evenly. Roger Goodell believes he is the end-all-be-all of everything in the NFL and his word is gospel and today Judge Berman said “No you are not”. I haven’t read the 40 page rebuke Berman penned but I’ve seen a lot of the coverage and read some of the excerpts and I find it amusing that when Judge Berman referred to the “independent” investigation run by Ted Wells and NFL general counsel Jeffrey Pash he literally puts the word independent in quotation marks. How could an investigation run by a man being paid $2-3 million by the NFL and a guy who’s office is literally right next to Goodell’s in the NFL headquarters in New York be considered independent? How could Roger Goodell, the man who handed down the initial suspension (he says it was Troy Vincent’s call, bullshit) be a neutral arbiter for Brady’s league appeal? Neither of these things is possible and anyone with any common sense can figure that out and Judge Berman obviously has some common sense.
I have one other problem with the way the media has spoken about Roger Goodell and something they don’t seem to be willing to pursue with the owners, who are Roger’s employers. Many media members say that when they ask the owners about whether or not they support Goodell keeping his job they all seem to say they do and the media says it’s because Goodell has made the owners so much money since he’s been commissioner. The television money is better than ever, ticket sales are good and people actually show up to games and somehow this is Goodell’s doing? I don’t believe for a second that if they fire Goodell it will somehow hurt them financially other than having to buy out his ridiculous contract. People do not go football games because of Roger Goodell, they do not tune in every Sunday, Monday and Thursday night because of Roger. I don’t buy NFL gear because of Roger and I’ve never met a single football fan that has. The idea that the NFL would be unable to replace Roger Goodell because he has some sort of super power that makes the NFL more profitable is ridiculous of course I suppose if we left it up to the owners they would probably just replace Goodell with Jeffrey Pash.
Any person with half a brain in Goodell’s position would go to the NFL Player’s Association and ask to sit down and find common ground. Roger Goodell wants the players to be held to a certain standard off the field and that’s understandable. The players want a fair and neutral party to determine the punishment in a case and they want to know what the rules are and what punishments they face if they break them beforehand, also completely understandable. Goodell is the guy that hands out the punishment so he by definition isn’t impartial when it comes to a players appeal. None of this should have ever happened and if the week after the AFC Championship game the NFL had announced that the Patriots had been fined $25,000 and Tom Brady had been fined $10,000 because some of the footballs the Patriots used had been underinflated that would have been the end of the story. The conspiracy theorists out there now believe Goodell blew this whole thing up and let it drag on in order to take attention away from the domestic violence issues and the concussion issues that were plaguing the NFL last season. Normally I would say that crazy but given the idiocy of this whole thing I’m starting to feel like it just might be possible. That’s how incredibly stupid this whole thing has become, I’m actually willing to believe that Goodell did this on purpose. I have to say, I’ve never been this ready for some real football.
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