Commentary

Robert Kraft helped create Roger Goodell, so he shouldn’t complain about the results of his work

AP Photo/Brandon Wade

By Michael Gee

May 18, 2015

5 minutes to read

Robert Kraft must not care for old movies. Obviously the Patriots owner has never seen “Frankenstein.’’ If he had, he never would have helped build Roger Goodell.

Frankenstein’s monster is what always comes to mind when Goodell pops up on my television screen. The NFL commissioner is a half-sentient creature lumbering about the NFL countryside, bringing devastation and grief in his wake not from malice, but sheer clumsiness. But at least the original monster had an excuse. He was brought back from the dead. Goodell hasn’t been, as far as we know. Self-righteousness, self-importance and a desperate need for the approval of others are why his brain doesn’t work as well as could be hoped.

The penalties leveled by the NFL (allegedly by Troy Vincent, not Goodell, but we know better) on Kraft’s football team for Deflategate are heavy. On one level, they’re absurdly harsh. The crime committed by Tom Brady and his overly loquacious henchmen was not one the league was inclined to take too seriously. For proof of that assertion, we need only go back to halftime of the AFC Championship Game.

Tipped off by the Indianapolis Colts prior to the game that New England could be using footballs below the legal air pressure limit, the game officials confiscated those balls at halftime and inspected them. Many were in fact below the limit. How did the officials react?

They didn’t award the Colts a win by forfeit. They didn’t throw Brady out of the game. Both teams went back out on the field for the next half.

Through confusion, extremely poor judgment and their own arrogance, Brady and the franchise Kraft operates then began to behave as if what had happened was indeed a major crime and that they had committed it. Their public denials of wrongdoing and private stonewalling of Ted Wells’ investigation are the sort of behavior that lets viewers guess the identity of the murderer on TV cop shows well before the third commercial break.

That’s the true crime, or rather blunder, for which the Pats are being punished. They defied a process devised by Goodell. They challenged Goodell’s self-image as a glorious guardian of NFL goodness. That image is complete fantasy, which is why it’s a deadly danger for any player, coach or owner brought up before the erratic bar of league justice.

By refusing full cooperation with the Wells investigation, by hampering said investigation when possible, Kraft’s franchise set up a zero-sum game for Goodell and itself, one where the commissioner had the final move. He could enact as strict a penalty on New England as he could imagine (he’s not an imaginative man). Then, when he shaved in the morning, he’d see Roger Goodell, hero, the man who guides the NFL without fear or favor, the guy who had the guts to punish the Super Bowl champions and the sport’s biggest star.

Or, Goodell could have made the punishment fit the initial crime, fined Brady $100,000 or so, and maybe taken a fifth-round draft pick away from the Patriots. Then Goodell wouldn’t have been a hero in his own mind or anyone else’s. He’d stand revealed as the weakling he is. He’d be accused, rightly or wrongly, of being in Kraft’s pocket. He wouldn’t be the Boss.

Anyone who works for a living runs into a superior for whom the idea of being in control is more important that the mundane job of managing. They are always terrible bosses. They usually don’t stick around long, succumbing to catastrophes of their own making.

Every time Goodell deals with discipline, it’s a catastrophe for the NFL, a catastrophe created by his lethal combination of cluelessness and need to feel powerful. Make no mistake, paranoid Pats fans. The rest of the NFL, especially the 31 other owners, regards Deflategate as a disaster. Even Jim Irsay is aware that having the league champions and most celebrated star player declared cheats is not good for business.

Deflategate, however, is not quite the catastrophe the Ray Rice affair was last year. The idea that the NFL had no idea violence against women was a serious crime was and is really bad for the pro football business. It’s an impression created by Goodell’s own bungling and the NFL’s subsequent coverup of the bungle. The circumstantial evidence that the league lied about its handling of Rice’s initial two-game suspension is at least as strong as the evidence indicating Brady conspired to doctor game balls.

In a business less high on its own supply, the Rice matter would’ve ended with Goodell’s resignation. It didn’t, and one reason why is that Goodell had no stronger supporter among NFL owners than Kraft.

Kraft knows much more about business than me or just about anyone else. That’s why I have little to no sympathy for his wails the Pats are being persecuted by the NFL or that he feels “betrayed’’ by Goodell. He has to know what Goodell is like. If nothing else, Spygate had to teach Kraft that the commissioner cannot abide the feeling he is being disrespected. Weak tyrants never can.

After the Rice case, and the Adrian Peterson case, and all the other cases Goodell screwed up in 2014, Kraft should have known he was tempting fate by challenging the commissioner’s rosy self-image (I bet that Goodell has a closet in his house containing a mockup of his bust for when he’s elected to the Hall of Fame). Did the Pats’ owner honestly think Goodell’s erratic judgment would never apply to his team? Did he think the commissioner’s toadying meant the two of them were true friends? If so, I’d have to reconsider my opinion of Kraft as a sharp operator.

My best guess is, Kraft supported Goodell for the same reason the other owners do (and will in Deflategate, too, just watch). In the end, their self-satisfaction and his are the same and have the same root cause — all the NFL’s obscene riches. As long as the money flows in, the commissioner must be doing a good job, even if all the sport’s customers hate him.

Commissioner Goodell looks in the mirror and sees the NFL logo staring back. Too bad Kraft’s football team had to take such a hit for him to learn how dangerous that is. He has learned a lesson social workers learn their first day on the job.

Enablers always get hurt.

Timeline of Deflategate

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