How the Patriots could have avoided all this

The worst part of all this isn’t that the New England Patriots will have to deal without Tom Brady for the first four games of the 2015 NFL season. It isn’t the $1 million fine the team incurred via the feigned wrath of commissioner Roger Goodell, or even the ultra-valuable draft picks Bill Belichick lost, all for being personally exonerated in the Wells Report.

No, the most egregious factor to arise from the NFL’s sanctioned magma regarding Deflategate is that the Patriots never had to let it come to this.

The Patriots, never should have let it come to this.

There’s little question that the NFL is punishing the Patriots, in part, for past sins; both New England’s and their own. Without any concrete evidence to nail Brady and the Patriots to accusations of deflating footballs in the AFC Championship game and beyond, the league cited the team’s past transgressions in Spygate in explaining its ruling, while also announcing to the world that a new, more stringent NFL is now in place, one year after the league was generally regarded as blind to the rampant transgressions that Goodell addressed with a dartboard discretion.

Robert Kraft should have known better.

The Patriots owner seems to have put his unrelenting faith in his quarterback and coach, only to have that trust bite him in the wallet and his team’s reputation outside of the five New England states, and whatever portion of Connecticut you want to keep under local jurisdiction.

The last time Kraft was in this position, only eight years ago, he took the league’s medicine for Belichick’s propensity to Memorex the moments, and called his coach a “schmuck” after learning just how little the practice of video taping opposing coaches’ signals helped the Patriots.

How much or how little did Brady’s preference of having his footballs deflated to a certain level help the 37-year-old, four-time Super Bowl champion? Whether Patriots fans like it or not, that’s the question at the center of Brady’s extensive legacy, particularly for a guy who looked like a shell of himself early last season, until, of course, as the Wells investigation detailed, he got fed up with the overinflation levels of the footballs in an October game against the New York Jets.

Up to and including that Oct. 16 game, Brady was 151-for-246, a 61.38 completion percentage. In the final nine games of the season, he was 222-for-336, a 66.07 completion percentage, a difference that might be scrutinized as proof Brady needed to cheat in order to retain his status as a top-flight NFL quarterback. Of course, he also won the Super Bowl with closely-watched footballs presumably inflated to proper levels, but whatever…

But if Kraft is indeed willing to wage the battle he’s already taken on with Goodell and the NFL, he’ll need to know the facts from his franchise quarterback. Based on his infamous demand of an apology in Arizona, it’s likely he never received anything resembling the truth from Brady.

Really, this whole thing is on the Patriots’ Boy Wonder. Team employees Jim McNally and John Jastremski come off looking like the biggest stooges in the championship caper, but it’s more and more evident that Brady served as the ringleader of his preferences, prompting “the deflator” to make it happen “by any means necessary,” which might as well be the the extension to the Patriots’ team mantra of “do your job…”

What if Brady had just come out and admitted the practice in the hours after Deflategate became a hashtag? What if he reasoned that he preferred the balls on the lower level of the spectrum, and maybe his guys got a little overzealous, yet he took full responsibility?

Sorry, there’s no way that Goodell would have suspended him for the Super Bowl, such an unreasonable assessment of the scenario that has Brady immediately copping to the accusations. It is just illogical to think that would happen before the NFL’s annual celebration of itself.

Brady may have faced some initial heat, but his admission would put a leak in the popular theory that he believes he’s bigger than the game, and the rampant pitchfork reaction would have simmered by the time his Super Bowl comeback drives cemented the very legacy that some reactionary circles have already labeled tainted.

We never would have had the Ted Wells Bloodhound Gang on the case. The team might not be out a first-round draft pick and a fourth-rounder. It might not be shelling out $1 million, and the only question would be whether or not Brady would face a suspension to begin 2015 for monkeying with the equipment.

The moment Kraft demanded that apology upon arriving for Super Bowl week, we should have had an inkling this wouldn’t end well. Not when the NFL was clearly out to make a statement to the rest of the league and its fans with its over-the-top punishment that goes well beyond what the San Diego Chargers, Cleveland Browns, and Atlanta Falcons all recently copped to for breaking rules in the name of competitive advantages.

But how did a personal preference about football inflation that runs afoul of the rules become a major cheating scandal? And is Brady also now a “schmuck” in Kraft’s eyes for placing the order?

Or is he a “schmuck” for lying?

Either way, the Patriots are paying both for their faith in Tom Brady and the yet-to-be absolved sins of Bill Belichick while the Pope of the NFL does his victory tour throughout the rest of the league.

Deflategate may be a sham, but it’s one the Patriots made possible. The only reason we’re here now is because Brady and the Patriots were too arrogant and focused on escaping the accusations instead of admitting the misdemeanor.

What a bunch of schmucks.