Six months ago, Tom Brady lifted his record-tying fourth super bowl trophy on a night in which he should have never been allowed to put on a Patriots uniform and touch a single football.
It’s been six long months since the deflategate scandal first broke, in which 11 of 12 footballs used by the Patriots in the AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts were underinflated, quarterback Tom Brady’s punishment of a four game suspension has been upheld. But, Patriots head coach Bill Belichick exits the investigation completely unscathed.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft made an agreement in March to pay a fine and lose a couple draft picks with the hopes of the NFL reducing Brady’s sentence. But his punishment was not reduced.
Saying Brady is innocent is like saying Sanjaya should have won season six of American Idol. But, Brady is not the only person who should have been punished in this case. Belichick should have received the same punishment that Brady is receiving for using deflated footballs during a game.
The whole world knows that Belichick is a man willing to bend the rules after the spygate incident in 2007 where the Patriots were caught videotaping the New York Jets’ defensive signals. The NFL fined the Patriots head coach $500,000, the largest fine ever imposed on a coach in the league, but Belichick never missed any time.
Belichick is like the politician of the NFL, always weaseling his way out of sticky situations that he created himself. In 2007 he returned to the sidelines the very next game and proceeded to go undefeated on the season. This year once again, he will be able to call plays from the field.
While Brady and Belichick are probably innocent in the sense that they did not personally deflate any football, there is no doubt that they knew it was happening. John Jastremski and Jim McNally are the two locker room equipment assistants who are at the center of the scandal. In the investigation report, it is noted that the two had exchanged text messages with each other and with Brady discussing ball pressure.
No sane person would believe that the two locker room attendants would deflate a football that was fit to Brady’s liking without his knowledge of the situation. Also, Brady threw his innocence out the window when he destroyed his phone, which contained tens of thousands of text messages, before speaking with investigators.
I doubt Brady broke his phone because he didn’t want the investigators to see the things that he was texting his wife, model Gisele Bundchen.
Of course, Brady spewed even more lies when he posted to Facebook claiming that he replaced his broken phone with a new one after he was told the NFL would not need to investigate his phone.
Kraft even issued a statement saying how he was in disbelief of the NFL’s decision to sustain Brady’s suspension. He was probably just heartbroken because his best friend, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell went behind his back and suspended his star player anyway.
But the icing on top of the world’s nastiest cake is that the NFL Players Association is filing a counterclaim to the NFL’s decision to uphold Brady’s punishment.
The NFLPA provided four reasons for arguing Brady’s innocence: he had a lack of notice for what policies he was being punished for breaking, insufficient procedures regarding the methods used to gather information for the case, an unfair process put on by Goodell and the commissioner’s partiality.
It is funny that the NFLPA believe Goodell to be partial when he is always cozying up side by side to Kraft. Does anyone else see the irony here?
All of the written submissions from the NFLPA must be filed before Aug. 14 and the union asked for a ruling to be announced before Sept. 4, six days before the Patriots open the season against the Steelers.
With so much time and effort put into a case about deflated footballs, one would hope that Brady would have confessed by now so the world can enjoy the upcoming football season, sans cheating.