Getty Images
Call me a homer, but a four-game suspension for Tom Brady is a little much given the lack of concrete evidence and the fact that he has no priors.
The NFL admittedly has botched player discipline in the past, so I won’t even bring up the fact that Ray Rice was handed a two-game suspension for knocking his girlfriend unconscious, until the surveillance camera forced Roger Goodell‘s hand. In reality, though, the suspension handed down to Brady by Goodell will likely be reduced to two, maybe three games upon appeal. The suspension is more about Brady’s failure to fully cooperate during the investigation than it is the air pressure in a football.
When the NFL released the punishments for Brady and the New England Patriots this afternoon, it damn near blew up the Internet. Everybody had an opinion and some are just ludicrous. For anybody who thought Brady should have been suspended for an entire year for “more probably than not” being aware of the intentional deflation of some footballs, I ask you to answer this one question.
If this was such a serious offence and “detrimental to the integrity of the NFL,” why were the Patriots allowed to use the footballs in the first half of the AFC Championship game? The Indianapolis Colts expressed their concern to the league before the game. The league notified Dean Blandino and Alberto Riveron, a senior officiating supervisor who would be at the game. Riveron made sure to notify referee Walt Anderson. The balls were then properly inflated and inspected before kickoff. Then, for the first time in his 19-year career, Anderson was unable to locate the bag of game balls.
Um … How does the light bulb not go off in Anderson’s head? He was told before the game that the Colts had concerns that the Patriots were intentionally deflating game balls and then the balls mysteriously go missing, and he thinks nothing of it? The fact is, the league attempted to catch the Patriots in the act and were willing to let them “violate the playing rules” for the entire first half of the AFC Championship. They could have easily prevented it from happening. If this was such a major violation of the rules, why let them get away with it for the first half. The reality is that the amount of air in a football has little significance on the outcome of a football game.
Had Brady not thrown an interception and the Colts were unable to measure the air pressure, would anything have happened? Would Riveron have decided to test the air pressure in the footballs at halftime? We’ll never know.
The fact is, Brady and the Patriots are receiving these harsh penalties mainly for the failure to fully cooperate during the investigation. Once Brady and his team appeal the initial ruling, he will undoubtedly serve a reduced suspension. He’ll get one game for obstruction and one game for his alleged role and knowledge in this nonsense.
Derek McVay is a Boston Celtics beat writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @mcvay34, or add him to your network on Google.
