Dear NFL, you’re screwed
COMMENTARY
Here’s where the fun begins.
Sixteen weeks after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell decided that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s “probable’’ involvement in the egregious act of deflating footballs was enough of a crime to deserve a four-game suspension — double the amount of games he initially delivered Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice a year ago for slugging his then-fiancee to an elevator floor — New England has its quarterback back.
The rest of the National Football League has been placed on notice.
In the end, Judge Richard M. Berman was just as condescending toward the NFL in his 40-page decision as he was in the first two hearings that led Brady’s vindication on Thursday. In vacating Brady’s four-game suspension, Berman skewered Goodell and the league for their supposed “independent’’ investigation, making note of that farce by repeatedly placing the word in quotations. He clarified the league’s punishment as “industrial justice,’’ and dressed down Goodell, Ted Wells, and Jeff Pash to such a degree that it would be of little surprise to see the NFL sheepishly admit defeat and eschewing the right to appeal.
That’s the only mystery remaining. We know how the rest of this will go.
As of Thursday morning, the Patriots were at only 11-to-1 odds to win Super Bowl 50 in San Francisco next February, trailing the likes of heavier favorites including the Philadelphia Eagles (10-to-1), Indianapolis Colts (9-to-1), Green Bay Packers (15-to-2), and the Seattle Seahawks (7-to-1), the team New England beat for the right to hang a fourth championship banner at Gillette Stadium next Thursday night.
Now that Brady is officially back — barring a speedy appeal process — the Patriots are suddenly tied with the Packers and Seahawks atop the picks at 15-to-2.
We’ve seen this script before. Hell hath no fury like a Patriots team scorned.
It’s always the Colts, isn’t it? More than a decade ago it was team president Bill Polian who petitioned the league to institute illegal contact after Patriots defensive backs abused Peyton Manning’s wide receivers in the 2003 playoffs. In 2007, Bill Belichick loaded up on wide receivers Randy Moss, Wes Welker, and Donte Stallworth after watching Brady and his subordinate group of Reche Caldwells pale in comparison to Manning and his high-powered attack in the AFC Championship game.
Now, we have Deflategate to add to the already-icy annals between the two teams. With Oct. 18 looming larger than ever.
The AFC Championship rematch won’t be Brady’s first game back from his suspension, a potential soap opera bonanza that the NFL ultimately couldn’t see materialize. Like it matters. The ratings for that game, the season-opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers, and…hell, any time Bill Belichick graces the monitor, will leave TV executives giddy with anticipation for as many Patriot games as possible to fall into their laps.
Brady has had his season rightfully rewarded back to him in time for the showdown against the Colts. That’s an even bigger deal than you might assume. Keep in mind, through the first four games last season, Brady only threw four touchdowns with two interceptions, and whispers circulated that the downside of his Hall of Fame career had finally arrived.
By Week 5, he was passing for 292 yards and two touchdowns in New England’s 43-17 win over the Cincinnati Bengals. We’re on to Indianapolis, indeed.
But it won’t be only the Colts who will lay in the wasteland path of the Patriots’ 2015 Middle Finger Tour. Remember, the Patriots were hit in Bob Kraft’s wallet with Goodell’s $1 million fine — the largest ever incurred by any NFL franchise — and Belichick’s drafting board with the subtraction of first and fourth-round picks. The NFL turned Deflategate into a deviated circus, making damn well sure that it won the summer public relations battle that it bungled so horrifically over the course of the Rice situation in 2014. What better way to re-gain the public’s trust in its discipline do-over than to persecute the most-polarizing franchise in the game?
It backfired. Oh, did it tremendously backfire.
I’m not sure at what point the hue and cry over the accusations of deflating footballs reached a pandering peak, but it was definitely by the time Ted Wells — Independent Ted Wells — released his incomplete and highly-mocked report of what went down last January in Foxborough. That was only the beginning of the Patriots’ tempers boiling to the surface along with the all-too-defensive Wells Report in Context, which introduced us to the term “deflating’’ as a means to losing weight in the days following the NFL’s punishment. When Goodell upheld the suspension in July, noting Brady’s failure to cooperate with Wells and the destruction of his cell phone, most of the other owners and coaches in the league were probably smiling to themselves watching the Patriots get served a dose of medicine, the same one many of them had to endure as Kraft was lauding the work done by his good buddy Roger.
The ones not smiling were the 13 teams on New England’s regular season schedule.
They know what’s coming.
Not that this is a more talented offensive juggernaut than the 2007 team that went 16-0 and came within a miracle catch of completing the first 19-0 season in NFL history. It isn’t. Brady may still be at the top of his game, but he isn’t 30 anymore. Rig Gronkowski and Julian Edelman may be as close to equals as the quarterback can expect to Moss and Welker that year, but expecting the Patriots to run up the score against each and every opponent would be foolhardy over the course of a schedule that includes the Cowboys, Colts, Eagles, and Texans.
Only most of the time.
There will be no apologies from the Patriots sideline, no sheepish relenting in the name of a perceived sportsmanship attribute that is but a mirage at the professional level. The NFL and everybody who celebrated in the team’s misfortune in the months after hoisting the Lombardi Trophy are on the list.
Winter is coming. Revenge is coming.
The Patriots are incensed. The rest of the NFL is their punching bag.
This is your reward, New England fans, your light at the end of the tunnel after enduring eight months of stupidity. Brady is back and the banner will be raised. Along with all hell in the weeks that follow.
The Patriots are about to earn their comeuppance. Deal with it, America.
Patriots fans revel in Brady decision
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