Brace yourselves, NFL fans. Deflategate is officially back. Despite the fact that Tom Brady and the New England Patriots had won their court case about the notorious deflated balls prior to last season, the NFL made the idiotic decision to pursue an appeal for the decision. Now, the NFL has gotten their way and won the appeal in court. Brady will not be playing for the first four games of the season. The NFL is going to regret their choice, as the league has other issues that are more important that a deflated football.

The fact of the matter is that the NFL has an image problem, and it is not getting better. Many of the star players in the NFL have some issues, and they are often the ones who are making the most headlines. I mean, right now a lot of fans are focused on the plight of Johnny Manziel, who has had some issues with substance abuse and is expected to be indicted for a misdemeanor assault in Dallas.

Earlier in the offseason, it was LeSean McCoy causing trouble off the field in a bar fight in Philadelphia. And let’s not forget that Will Smith, a former New Orleans Saints star pass rusher, was recently shot to death after a road rage incident, the details of which are still coming out.

And what about the domestic violence issues that have plagued the NFL over the past couple of years? How can the league allow Greg Hardy, a man who should be a convicted criminal, play while barring Brady from competition for a rule that many other passers have broken? It just makes no sense. The NFL should be focusing on issues related to violence off the field, not the effect that a slightly deflated ball had on a game that was already a blowout win for the Patriots.

The penalties that the Patriots and Brady were dealt were already egregious in nature, especially their loss of a first-round draft pick, so why the NFL attempted to overrule the appeal still mystifies me. Yes, Brady likely cheated on the field, but other quarterbacks admitted to having improperly inflated balls as well.

Super Bowl winning quarterback Aaron Rodgers admitted that he likes to have his footballs overinflated. Brad Johnson, former Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback, admitted that the balls he used in the Super Bowl were not properly inflated either. And that was in the Super Bowl, not just the conference championship game.

Getting back to the punishment, why were the Patriots given a harder sentence than the New Orleans Saints from Bountygate, where the Saints admittedly tried to injure other NFL players on the field to try and gain a competitive advantage? They were only docked a couple of second-round picks, not a first-rounder. Again, I will acknowledge that the Patriots likely did cheat, but did they really do more harm than Gregg Williams, Sean Payton and the rest of the Saints did on a league-wide scale? Not even close.

Here’s one final point: if this had been any quarterback aside from Brady, then the issues would not have been as overblown (no pun intended). Think about the allegations Peyton Manning has dealt with over the past months in regards to PED use and sexually assaulting a women during his time at Tennessee. Nationwide, people have been quick to defend Manning without even investigating the accusations in depth. Had Brady been in that position, he would have been condemned. Had Manning been the one who deflated the balls, excuses would have been made immediately, as we saw with the other stories.

There is no point in going on and on about how unfair the Deflategate punishment is. It is what it is. Did the Patriots deserve to be punished? Probably. Were the punishments unfair? Absolutely. The league should have gotten its priorities in order and moved past Deflategate to focus on the other more important and human issues plaguing the league. They did not, and now we are stuck talking about it once again.