The Goodell Mirror

Matt Chatham authors a superb summation of the complete dishonesty of Roger Goodell.

"The NFLPA simply failed to predict the league would act with such scumbaggery."

It's clear the owners, while they couldn't make this prediction, nonetheless had some inkling there is something wrong with a career front-office bureaucrat, because they needed multiple votes before they elected him commissioner; they nonetheless took the chance and everyone is now paying the price.  

It's also interesting with Goodell's decision to go after four players named in the now-defunct Al Jazeera TV piece on NFL steroids and Peyton Manning for "non-cooperation." Some think it is him emboldened by court decisions against Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson (which apparently made no effort to actually examine the facts involved), and while there's some validity there, there is also the angle discussed in some forums suggesting it is a power play to the NFLPA with CBA negotiations due in 2020 and the belief the NFLPA will fight against Article 46 of the present CBA - if that is a part of this (and I suspect it is), there is also the power play angle by Goodell toward the other owners, who have been quietly undermining him; one sense Goodell is flexing muscle not just to the NFLPA but to the owners, conveying that he is in charge and no one else.

Why Goodell Is The Deflategate Loser

 

Two pieces in the wake of Tom Brady's decision to hand off the suit against the NFL to the NFLPA warrant a look. The first examines how Roger Goodell actually conducts player discipline hearings - and what it shows is Goodell is a demagogue with zero honesty and no desire to do anything but punish players for its own demented sake. Lawyer Peter Ginsberg notes that Goodell looks for reaffirmation of his view - "It's very difficult to have a genuine, authentic disagreement with Roger" - and writer Tim Rohan notes Goodell takes personal offense when a player defends himself to him.

It's a pattern noted in the past by sports law professor Jeffrey Standen and by writer Sally Jenkins. Jenkins comes out firing yet again by noting that the myth of Goodell having more power now than before is false - "vain NFL owners" publicly won't admit they made a mistake electing him commissioner but privately have been working to undermine him, between negotiating with the NFLPA on a new personal conduct policy and already starting to declaw Goodell with the hiring of Tod Leiweke as league CCO and ex-White House press flak Joe Lockhart (who reports to Leiweke rather than Goodell) as VP of Communications. Indeed, the July 19 Monday Morning Quarterback story by Jenny Vrentas - "The Goodell Decade" - serves mostly as a mawkish disinformation piece to press the myth of Goodell as more powerful than ever.

The owners have already started cleaning up after him. Standen noted it took some five votes in 2006 before they agreed to elect him Commissioner. It clearly is a sign that they now quietly feel they were wrong.

Worth remembering is fifty-six lies told by the NFL about Brady.

Blandino: NFL Security Withheld PSI Measurements From Officials

Dean Blandino's admission about NFL checks of PSI further indicates Roger Goodell fabricated a reason to punish the New England Patriots.

Brady Suspension Shockingly Reinstated

Presented is a piece from Pro Football Talk of Judge Katzmann's dissent (to be found on Page 34 of the Ruling) from the three judge Second Circuit appeals court's ruling for the NFL in suspending Tom Brady.

That Goodell's derangement has been personal and not driven by any objective understanding of the inner workings of the game (and the dishonesty displayed throughout this ordeal) brings to mind that his election as Commissioner needed multiple votes by the owners, who clearly had misgivings about his competence.    And time and bitter experience appears to be solidifying doubts among league owners.

NFL: Endorsing A Concussion Demagogue And Declawing Goodell

The NFL is in DC this week and two stories have broken that are pretty big. The more immediate one is that the league and the NFLPA are negotiating a new player discipline policy that in essence declaws Roger Goodell. DeMaurice Smith of the NFLPA says a new deal has to settle present controversies, notably the league's absurd punishment of Tom Brady.

That the league has come to this extends beyond punishment of players.   It basically serves as a fundamental rebuke of Roger Goodell's raison d'etre.  Goodell was elected NFL commissioner to reign in players whose off-field behavior had supposedly spiraled out of control - "the inmates were running the asylum" is the term I've heard used.   The problem quickly became that the players were not the problem; Goodell immediately made himself the problem by handing down punishments based on his own personal spite, and punishing players based on mere accusations.   Sports law professor Jeffrey Standen back during the Spygate fiasco showed how the owners themselves had serious doubts about Goodell's judgement to be commissioner, and now we've had nothing but proof he never should have been elected.

So it would seem declawing him on player punishments is but step one toward removing him from office entirely. 


The second story is that NFL official Jeff Miller, during a roundtable discussion in DC with Rep. Jan Shakowsky, answered a question about football concussions  - "Do you think there is a link between football and degenerative brain disorders?"  Miller replied yes by citing recent research by Ann McKee of Boston University.   That the league cited Ann McKee is surprising given what real science says, such as this piece on the study of six deceased CFL players, a piece that overall refuses demagoguery about football - "It is difficult to establish a definitive link between multiple concussions and the development of CTE" is the piece's conclusion).

McKee has been one of the more demagogic pushers of the myth of football killing its players - McKee's research (and that of the BU group in general) too often dumbs down the definition of brain degeneration by including as evidence of CTE the results of normal aging, and the research has been disputed by the British Journal Of Sports Medicine.  "McKee zealously looks for CTE and the methods she employs help her to find it." So why is the NFL endorsing a concussion demagogue instead of real science that puts icewater on McKee's premise? For that matter it seems the larger media has ignored any source of CTE information other than the BU group.

The game has been safer for so long that to let a group of academic demagogues set a sham debate about its safety is stupidity at its worst. 

Sally Jenkins On The Continuing Goodell Lie

The NFL's appeal to the Second Circuit appeals panel to overturn the overturning of its suspension of Tom Brady got a lot of attention when new NFL lawyer Paul Clement repeated a lie told by Roger Goodell. Sally Jenkins dispels the lie.

Fire Roger Goodell

NOTE: This was first published on August 6, it was updated by early September, and has required another pertinent update at the end of October -


The suspension of Tom Brady took on a life of its own that the National Football League created, and the slamming of the league by Judge Richard Berman in overturning the suspension showed the league cannot escape without some fundamental change, for the campaign against Brady over the 2014 AFC Championship Game has revealed in graphic detail that there is no longer any justification for Roger Goodell to retain his job as NFL Commissioner.   Goodell has proven beyond any objective doubt that he is a failure and must be fired.

Why fire Goodell?  Let us count the ways -


Roger Goodell is maliciously ignorant of the game and of his job  - The transcript of the Brady appeal showed that the league was completely ignorant of the fact that footballs lose PSI naturally and it is just the latest example of how ignorant the Goodell-era NFL is about the game and of its own rulebook. That ignorance was first displayed in Spygate - as Scott Shaffer put it, "The media reports as if filming opposing coaches is a violation of NFL rules.   Roger Goodell shares this belief (and) based his punishment on it......However, the rules don't support this belief."   The start of Spygate was a 2006 memo sent to teams by Ray Anderson about sideline videotaping, a memo that misquoted the rules.   Goodell never tried to correct the error; instead he couldn't accept when Belichick schooled him on the rulebook and based punishment of Bill Belichick on cherry-picking the rulebook where Belichick applied the rule consistently.

Ignorance of the game continued with his punishment of the Saints over "Bountygate."   Goodell regarded player side bets for hits on opponents as some kind of rules violation,  and after a prolonged smear campaign and resultant legal fight (aided by the American Enterprise Institute's data disproving Goodell's premise of the Saints playing dirty) Goodell lost, and was publicly dressed down for his approach by former commissioner Paul Tagiabue.

The Brady transcript repeatedly shows Goodell being caught by surprise by new documents and generally being lazy and unprepared.

Goodell likes to talk unctuously about "the integrity of the game" - and has never offered any explanation why sideline videotaping somehow violates said integrity, or why a trumped-up allegation of football tampering somehow reflected a violation of the game's integrity.   It's because he has no clue about the integrity of the game.


Goodell refuses accountability, he strives to cover his own ass  -  The league falsifying the rulebook and then basing punishment on that falsified reading of the rulebook has become the pattern in Goodell's punishments.   As Matt Chatham and others have shown, Goodell has repeatedly changed the rules - or as Antonio Cromartie put it, made them up as he goes.  Often cited in media accounts was Article 46 of the CBA, except Goodell couldn't make it stick in his past punishments and failed to make it work against Brady  On Brady, Goodell made an issue of "non-cooperation" and treated it as though it were part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement - even though in fact it "didn't exist in the most current version of the CBA....(It was) introduced in the commissioner's panicky do-over rewriting of the league's personal conduct policy, released in December 2014."

Sally Jenkins noted that what makes Goodell's rulings so entertaining "is because he always doubles back."   When Ray Rice's initial suspension raised a media uproar - even though TMZ's infamous elevator video verified Rice's testimony to everyone - Goodell played CYA and smeared Rice to be a liar - and of course lost in court because of it.   Tom Brady's cellphone wasn't important until Goodell once again needed something to cover his ass.


Goodell is a liar on a continuing and colossal scale - Goodell lied to the Patriots - through David Gardi's January 19 letter, though Dean Blandino denials of his knowledge of the ordeal, and we suspect also directly to Robert Kraft during the May 2015 team owner meetings that saw Kraft accept Goodell's malicious punishments; when Goodell stabbed the Patriots in the back it led to Kraft's now-famous training camp missive about how he shouldn't have trusted the league - and has lied about the Patriots.   He lied about Brady "destroying his cellphone" and hid the fact Brady acknowledged changing his cellphones - because it was not relevant to anything.  Goodell lied about footballs being tampered with and lied about the nature of Tom Brady's correspondence with ball attendant John Jazstremski (Ted Wells shared in the lie; the two refused to face that text messages they wanted to believe proved tampering was occurring were irrelevant to the truth - and as Dan Wetzel shows, this belief is contradicted by Goodell's own ruling and the Wells Report). Goodell's side also admitted to Judge Richard Berman the league never had any actual evidence against Brady, showcasing Goodell's shaky grasp of truth, especially when Judge Berman showed how Goodell's "generally aware" indictment of Brady was in essence a sham.   In Spygate he lied about what the rulebook allows regarding sideline videotaping (and as noted above the league's memos falsified what the rulebook said).   He lied about the New Orleans Saints players in "Bountygate."   He lied about Ben Roethlisberger's rape accusation, which got him a four-game suspension in 2010 and was publicized by Sports Illustrated in a lengthy piece I suspect it regrets ever publishing.   There is also reason to believe Goodell is the source of the phony PSI story Chris Mortensen wrote after the AFC Championship Game - which would make him more of a liar in that he himself is the instigator of a smear campaign.

Bizarrely adding to the lie is Mortensen himself stood by the story on an August 27, 2015 interview on an Arizona radio show with Cardinals color analyst Ron Wolfley; Mortensen then added the whopper that the Krafts apologized to him, a claim immediately refuted first by the Dennis & Callahan Show on WEEI then by Jonathan Kraft himself before the Panthers preseason game; adding to the disinformation angle from the league, Mike Florio told WEEI that the league stonewalled his efforts to verify Mortensen's story and that it was part of an effort he called "a prosecution against the Patriots."

That prosecution took a lower turn at the end of October when the league shook down several Patriots employees while examining the visitors locker room for transmitting devices, an old hack accusation made against the Patriots with this specific one made by the Jets that has never been credible (opponent team security controls visitor locker rooms) and which turned up nothing but which raises the question of just how far the NFL will go in its prosecution against the Patriots.

Wetzel notes that players and teams need to be scared because the league has proven it cannot be trusted on anything regarding its conduct.   That the league office has been exposed as a liar engaged in a massive smear campaign against its best team - punishment of success on a vulgar scale - showcases that Roger Goodell must be fired.

ESPN Continues The Smear Of The Patriots

ESPN and also Sports Illustrated released pieces today rehashing long-discredited accusations of cheating by the New England Patriots, this in the wake of Roger Goodell's complete discrediting at the hands of Judge Richard Berman.   Goodel's discrediting by Berman showed how unfit for his office he is for it showcased his megalomania and complete ignorance of the game over which this ex-PR flack for the league office presides.

The ESPN and SI pieces rehash the mythology of cheating allegations made against the Patriots - that the Patriots stole playsheets and rigged transmitters in opponent locker rooms etc. - never mind that the security details of visiting teams control those areas, not the Patriots, and that Spygate was not about any violation of NFL rules, it was about the dishonesty and ignorance of Roger Goodell. It is noteworthy that the only real source for ESPN's story (it cites unnamed sources - and I will call out ESPN that these unnamed sources were made up by the writers) is long-discredited former assistant Matt Walsh, who was fired by the Patriots and was exposed as not credible by the league when it turned to him for what it thought would be a smoking gun of Patriots cheating - and merely got more sideline videotapes.   Walsh does not give information in good faith.

The piece's conclusion rehashes the excuses about the Brady verdict - "It didn't matter that Berman only ruled on whether the league had followed the Collective Bargaining Agreement, not on Brady's guilt or innocence."   False - Berman got the league to admit it never had any evidence against the Patriots - all it had were inferences from text messages, inferences that were never relevant to anything.  In short Berman proved Brady (and by extension the Patriots) were innocent.  "It didn't matter that the Patriots had accepted the league's punishment in May."   Again false - Goodell lied to Bob Kraft in May (and lied to and about Tom Brady from the beginning) and it showed in Kraft's training camp presser where he admitted being wrong in trusting the league.   The reason for the lying stems from Goodell's fundamental dishonesty, shown ironically in an overlooked angle - the effort to pry away trade secrets.

The ESPN piece has earned more notoriety for questions about a 2008 statement from ex-Rams coach Mike Martz.   Among the allegations made against the Patriots is they were able to key on Rams back Marshall Faulk in the Superbowl XXXVI win.  What the piece ignores is the real reason the Patriots are winners - the Rams were about trying to beat toughness, thoroughness, and situational football with athleticism and talent - and it failed. The reality is the Rams thought they were innovative and creative and they were not; they relied on athleticism, not smart play; if anything the Rams may have been tipping their own plays the way they leaned on Marshall Faulk. What Belichick did was expose that football is not about athleticism - and also that Tom Brady is the superior quarterback.


The simple fact is there never was any cheating by the Patriots.    The facts have long proven this.   The league needs to face that other teams need to define their game up, stop dumbing it down and stop punishing success. 

Brady Wins Appeal

The transcript of Judge Richard Berman's vacation of the NFL's suspension of Tom Brady.

Dan Wetzel On Roger Goodell As Liar

NOTE - The following was initially published on August 5 -

Roger Goodell has emerged as a liar on a massive scale and Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports has become one one of the two strongest examiners of Goodell's dishonesty (Sally Jenkins is the other) as he examines how the Tom Brady transcript showcases the commissioner's dishonesty at work.  

FOLLOW-UP August 19: Wetzel also skewers the league after it got debunked by Judge Richard Berman.

Brady Appeal Transcript

The transcript of the Tom Brady appeal to Roger Goodell.

Sally Jenkins On Goodell's Ass-Covering Campaign

Sally Jenkins and Dan Wetzel have emerged as the most forceful exposers of the fraudulence of Roger Goodell's campaign to punish the Patriots. Here Jenkins skewers Goodell's habit of inflating the importance of irrelevance when he needs to cover his ass.

Patriots Derangement Syndrome

NOTE: Originally published May 20, it has been updated on July 28:


The decision by Robert Kraft not to continue fighting against the NFL over huge draft and monetary penalties imposed after the Ted Wells report on allegation of tampering with footballs won't lay to rest the hatred that has long existed toward his football team.   Kraft's reasoning not to continue fighting stems from fear of long-term damage to the game by pressing the issue, this even though objectively speaking Kraft is correct.   It is disappointing that Kraft has done this but understandable.

That it won't win him any support anywhere merely reinforces the reality of another wave of derangement that exists in the world - Patriots Derangement Syndrome.  

In the history of sports hated dynasties are fairly common, though in the NFL one struggles to recall national hatred of the Lombardi-era Packers or the Noll/Bradshaw-era Steelers or the Walsh/Siefert/Mariucci-era 49ers.   While the Oakland Raiders and their three Superbowls in the 1976-83 period earned a share of hatred due to dirty play on the field and dirty dealings by Al Davis off it, the long-standing poor play of the Raiders made them a joke rather than someone to genuinely hate.

The only two clubs to earn national hatred have been the Patriots of the Belichick era and the Dallas Cowboys.   Pronounced America's Team by NFL Films in their recap of Dallas' 1978 season, the Cowboys earned respect by twenty straight playoff seasons and the undisputed class of Roger Staubach and Tom Landry, but there was also a dislike of the team due to their national popularity.   When the Cowboys faltered after 1985 the hatred melted away, but returned with the surge to Superbowl success of Jimmy Johnson and the flamboyance of new owner Jerry Jones and players such as Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, Nate Newton, and Charles Haley.   The 1995 Superbowl season was especially contentious as drug addiction, sexual misconduct, and ever-escalating arrogance led to ever-escalating condemnation of the team - ironically illustrated when Deion Sanders called out the media over its criticism of Barry Switzer's 4th down attempt against the Eagles, a counterattack that rallied the team to its third Superbowl of the decade.   When the 1996 Cowboys collapsed to the Carolina Panthers in the playoffs,  the hostility showed when Nate Newton openly blamed the media for Dallas' loss, a reference to the accusation, soon proven false, of a gang rape by Irvin and several others.


*****


But national derangement against the Patriots has gone beyond Cowboys hatred, beginning with New England's 2001 Superbowl surge; even today condemnation proceeds about New England's playoff win over the Raiders despite the objective reality of the correctness of an incomplete "tuck" call.   Complaints about the Patriots' physical play against the Rams began once Superbowl XXXVI was won, complaints that ignored that teams promptly used those same tactics to completely neutralize the Rams in 2002 to where Kurt Warner's career effectively ended by that October and the Rams deteriorated into irrelevance by the end of 2004.  

The hatred continued with constant mocking of Tom Brady's game.   "Dink and dunk" is the never-ending gripe; "he had to rely on his kicker" is also repeated against all evidence (and ignoring such instances as Joe Montana's first Superbowl win against the Bengals where the 49ers needed to kick four field goals).   That Brady plays smart football - taking what the defense gives him and not trying to make something happen that cannot - wasn't "sexy" enough; that he played methodical football instead of trying to make it up as he goes - something other quarterbacks with more impressive volume stats tended to do - also aggravated a lot of fans.

The hatred extended to Bill Belichick, whose monotone press conferences have long grated reporters feeling themselves more important than they are and whose system has refused to rely on Name players or high draft picks but instead focuses on undrafted players, free agents, and depth, to where turnover of the roster is frequent and Brady has won Superbowls plus two additional AFC titles with what amounts to five different rosters.   Criticism of trading Deion Branch in 2006 is curiously still prevalent in some fan and media circles despite the fact his immediate replacement, Reche Caldwell, was a better player, staying on the field where Branch frequently got knocked out and posting the same numbers (60 yards per game) in non-Superbowl playoff games as Branch; Branch's lack of production in Seattle illustrated his overrated quality.

A curious case of refusing to understand Belichick's approach to roster construction is the 2009 draft where the Patriots have been criticized for refusing to draft Clay Matthews, who went to the Packers, instead trading down and collecting several players; they flipped one pick to get Julian Edelman in the seventh round that year, and it's proven a better investment than the overrated Matthews.

The media and the league office's misconduct about sideline videotaping in 2007 transmuted Patriot Derangement Syndrome into a genuine syndrome; the media and new commissioner Roger Goodell misread the league rulebook, thinking sideline taping of opposing coaches is a violation of NFL rules even though it wasn't. It began a pattern of Goodell's tenure as commissioner of always being unprepared, acting as a bully (which helps explain why Kraft decided not to continue the fight, as Goodell's stubbornness and his own derangement (Matt Chatham has noted Goodell has constantly rewritten the rules to cover his own ass) makes him get his pound of flesh even when he loses; Goodell's passive-aggressive backstabbing of Kraft in his presser the day after Kraft's illustrated this also), and always being caught by surprise, and it also continued the Mainstream Sports Media's pattern of inaccurate or grossly incomplete coverage of such issues (notably Ray Rice, with seemingly no one outside of the AP noticing Rice had told the truth to everyone about the fight that initially got him a two-game suspension).

It accelerated with the tail-chasing embarrassment that has been the investigation in allegation of football tampering, an investigation that produced ZERO evidence that any tampering ever happened yet smeared Tom Brady (via Goodell's predetermined verdict) and two ball attendants based on treating irrelevant text messaging - and assuming the refusal to turn over his cellphone to an investigation that couldn't control itself constituted some kind of crime by Brady - as something other than heresay.  

Suddenly attacking the Patriots had become a headline story on national news (though articles by notable writers such as Sally Jenkins, Dan le Betard, and Dan Wetzel suggest the Mainstream Sports Media is starting to get it about what really happened) and even in books such as the "untold" story of Spygate on the Amazon website, and countering with the facts has been drowned out by the rage for blood.    That people are tired of the same team winning every year is a natural reaction; as a league fan I've wanted teams that have struggled of recent to become winners again (notably the Titans, one of a handful of worthy opponents the Patriots have faced in Superbowl runs, as well as Houston - yes i catch myself calling them the Oilers - the Vikings, the Panthers - the best team that didn't win the Superbowl - the Lions, etc.), and it is curious that overlooked in the interregnum between Patriots Superbowl titles, seven other teams (the Steelers and NY Giants twice, the Colts, the Saints, the Packers, the Ravens, and the Seahawks) won the Superbowl.   That the condemnation maliciously ignores the facts is what is wrong.  

The Patriots revolutionized roster construction philosophy for the league and built a sustainable model for championship success; they've elevated the game to a level Lombardi, Bill Walsh, etc. could never reach.   And it is curious that the Seahawks have lately become the butt of online belittlement over their popularity, critics mocking it as somehow phony despite all evidence to the contrary.  

It may be the price of success.   Derangement, though, goes beyond reason.   The Patriots changed the game for the better; they defined it up - the critics need to stop defining it down.


POSTSCRIPT - the AEI's examination of Deflategate further shows Goodell to be a liar.   And further implicating Goodell to be a liar is evidence further proving Sally Jenkins' point that Goodell was shopping for justification to punish success and promote parity - with an interesting take comparing it to the media smear campaign against Richard Nixon - while Jenkins laid out a realistic way out for Goodell. Goodell alas ignored the right thing to do and upheld his suspension based on Brady "destroying his cellphone," this even though the league had already obtained all the phone records and text messages it sought between Brady and John Jazstremski while there was no communication with ball attendant Jim McNally - the NFLPA also noted Goodell changing the rules to cover his own ass. So the league's position remains a crock and called out as such by the NFLPA.

NFL Punishing Success And Promoting Parity Still

Originally published May 7, this piece has been updated on June 12, on June 19, and again on July 29:

The new Ted Wells report on "Deflategate" is out and as with his hit job in favor of Jonathan Martin, the more one reads it the less credible it gets.   The first response came from Brady's agent Don Yee, and initial reaction suggests Brady will not accept whatever punishment Roger Goodell may hand down.

Given Roger Goodell and Ted Wells' history, he shouldn't.

The Wells report's conclusion uses the term "more probable than not," lawyerspeak for tacit admission that the case he was trying to make is not supported by evidence.   This is in keeping with Wells' approach to his attack on Richie Incognito at the behest of Jonathan Martin, further illustrated by Wells' disregard of what referee Walt Anderson said about how the gauge he used for measuring football PSI showed no evidence of tampering.   Yee notes Wells all but ignored Brady's testimony to him, which was an issue earlier in the investigation where there was media speculation about whether investigators even spoke with Brady.  There is also the angle where the league ostensibly is angry because Brady didn't turn over his cellphone to investigators - something Stephen Gostkowski also did, and which the league had no right to ask them to do to begin with. 

And the premise of the investigation - illegal tampering with footballs during a game, this despite the physical impossibility of such (a fact nowhere credibly disputed in the Wells report), to go with the forgotten January 2007 NFL rule change that allows quarterbacks to customize their footballs - is slipshod to start with.   The only real evidence the piece has is text messaging between two ball attendants; nowhere does the piece show any rule was broken by anyone, and it basically takes ordinary football-customizing - universal in the game - and presents it as a conspiracy.


It's been in keeping with Roger Goodell's maliciously ignorant approach to the game over which he lords (further reflected in a grossly inaccurate letter from NFL VP David Gardi to the Patriots on January 19).   Spygate happened because Bill Belichick showed up Goodell on what his own rulebook says, and Goodell reacted as a thin-skinned bully fearing for his legitimacy to hold his job as commissioner would do - he reacted violently and got his pound of flesh.   He reacted this way again against the New Orleans Saints in Bountygate, treating a legitimate player practice - side bets for clean hits - as an assassination program, in the process ignoring more questionable hits at that time by the Tennessee Titans, which at least earned some public protest as opposed to the wholly manufactured crisis hitting the Saints.   Here Saints players fought back - and won; even so Goodell got a pound of flesh by smearing and suspending coach Sean Payton. 

That the entire controversy is about punishing success and promoting parity - as Spygate was - shows in that the report not only shows Goodell's never-ending insincerity and amateurism, it is basically a gift to the Indianapolis Colts, who made the first protest and have reacted as losers do - self-servingly moralizing about a team they can't beat, and basically haven't since the 1970 merger. New England's history with the Colts has been wholly one-sided since the Colts moved to Indianapolis, and it's been best illustrated whenever Patriot-Colt playoff meetings sandwich between meetings with tougher opponents - 2003 famously saw co-MVPs Steve McNair's Titans and Peyton Manning's Colts come to Foxboro for the playoffs after rip-roaring regular-season games; McNair played like an MVP coming up a dropped Drew Bennett catch short, while Manning played like Ryan Leaf and got embarrassed. 2014 then saw it again as John Harbaugh's Baltimore Ravens fought it out and lost 35-31, while the Colts were summarily dismissed 45-7.

The Wells report's credibility started deteriorating as soon as it admitted Bill Belichick and Bob Kraft were not guilty of anything - that should have set skepticism going right away to what it did conclude.   But it's about punishing success - other teams don't want to define success up, as the Patriots have done.   They want to define it down and use Goodell and Wells as their hatchet men.



POSTSCRIPT: The league handed down a four-game suspension for Brady, and fined the Patriots $1 million and two draft picks, this despite officially exonerating the team and coach Bill Belichick.  Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive VP, said in his official letter, that Brady did not cooperate with investigators, a fact already refuted by writer Jerry Thornton.   There is also the issue of NFL Officiating VP Dean Blandino, who lied about his knowledge of the scandal.

AEI - which debunked the Bountygate smear against the Saints - has provided a lengthy analysis supporting Brady. Sally Jenkins in May first refuted the league's argument about Brady's cellphone - which further discredits Goodell's unctuous verbiage about Brady "destroying" his phone and then shows how the AEI analysis further paints Roger Goodell to be a liar. Further proving the league to be frauds is what Ted Wells told Brady about his cellphone - "Keep the phone...you give me documents that are responsive to this investigation." In short Goodell's position on Brady's cellphone is a crock and as such the NFLPA has appealed Brady's suspension.