Tom Brady is suspended without pay for the first 4 games next season. The Patriots will also be fined 1 million dollars and lose a first round draft pick in 2016 and a fourth round draft pick in 2017. http://espn.go.com/boston/nfl/story/_/id/12867594/punishments-handed-tom-brady-new-england-patriots-deflategate
Well it's hard to say if that's appropriate or not. The military actually has a pretty good sized advertising budget. $5.4 million over 3 years isn't that much.
True, but I bet 99% of Americans consider Be all you can be, or Army of One campaigns to be advertising. These were deceptive viral marketing ops playing to emotions, patriotism, and American fetishism of the military.
Even if you believe the Wells report makes the case for "more probably than not" cheating, taking away draft picks in addition to the Brady's suspension is totally ridiculous. The psi in the football is an in-game rule, no different fundamentally than the rules regarding holding, pass interference, personal fouls etc. Nobody has draft picks taken away because they committed too many holding penalties during the first half...and holding is a rules violation that gives you WAY more of an advantage vs. the opponent than the psi level in the football. The whole thing is insane.
I don't know. It seems like deflating a ball is more akin to using performance enhancing drugs for a competitive advantage than holding. The advantages it gave would have lasted every offensive play through the entire game and not just a single play like holding. Also, the balls were deflated prior to the game starting. Not during the game and not by a player. We also can't be sure how many games this occurred in or even how many seasons. Brady wouldn't comply with the investigation so I'm not surprised they didn't give him the benefit of the doubt.
John Madden has said that offensive holding could be called on almost every down in the NFL…if the officials called it strictly on the NFL rule book definition. So that's the first thing: NFL games are not actually called in strict accordance to the rules, which means that there's all kinds of "cheating" going down in every game that gives teams an advantage. Whether or not one team or the other did more "cheating" in that respect and got away with it to their advantage is anyone's guess. The NFL doesn't review the games to see how many penalties the officials missed. The other thing to consider is that the two equipment guys that Brady allegedly conspired with to deflate the footballs do not travel with the team for road games…so there's no way the Patriots could tamper with the game balls in the way the NFL claims they did for 50% of their games during the season. Are Brady's stats significantly worse on the road than at home? No. His QB rating is virtually identical, and he actually has a higher YPG average on the road. His TD-to-INT ratio is exactly the same (+96) for road/home games since 2006, which is the year the rule was enacted to allow QBs more control over game balls (legal to scuff them up and condition the surface to exactly what they wanted).
I've never though of penalties as cheating. It's just part of the game. Players try to push the rules as far as they can go and the referees are judges. If we see a player constantly get away with holding we get mad at the refs for not calling it but we don't get mad at the players. I don't believe anyone would say the player is being unethical when they hold. However, hiding in a closet and deflating the balls before a game has a certain unethical vibe to it.
This doesn't actually involve anyone seeing anything though. And it's also something that the NFL always leaves to the officiating crew, which is basically the "judge" aspect you're talking about. They check the footballs before the game, then have constant hands-on access to the footballs during the game and the authority to remove them from play if they think there's something wrong with them. Why was that suddenly not good enough for the NFL? It's not like the NFL can claim they have a past history of checking the psi at halftime or have decades of data to back up their claims that the psi drop was unusual.
I think the NFL is living on borrowed time. I'm doubtful that it will even still be around (as we know it) in 10 years.
Paying the fine for the Patriots in a gofundme is just dumb. You could buy a team jersey and it would probably amount to the same thing. I do like the #NoBradyNoBanner idea though...
Reader's Digest version: the psi measurements are complete garbage from a scientific standpoint and the main premise of the investigation (that Tom Brady wanted a psi lower than 12.5 to start the game) isn't supported by any evidence from either the text messages or the interviews. The only evidence that exists regarding Brady's psi preference is multiple known instances where he said he wanted it to be 12.5. If Goodell tries to ignore the problems and steamroll the Pats in arbitration, I think Kraft goes to court outside the NFL and Goodell goes down in flames. Arbitration is probably the only place Goodell can save himself. Kraft already stated that he was willing to accept a reasonable punishment, so Goodell just has to figure out what that is.
It's just funny because they are arguing the case like it's in a court of law but I don't think the commission sees it that way. They are both the prosecutor and judge in their own court. If a player were to fart by the queen of England and then get suspended for it they could argue all day about wind direction and lack of real fart measurements but in the end the NFL would just be like, "you embarrassed us and you're out".
NFL rules are legal standards. Goodell can't really ignore the standards of evidence required to punish someone for breaking a rule, and the psi measurements are a disaster for the NFL on that point. For example, there were two different gauges used to measure the footballs at halftime. One gauge measured BOTH the Colts and Patriots footballs to not be in violation of the rule (either within the NFL limits or the limits of natural deflation). The other gauge measured BOTH the Colts and Patriots footballs to be in violation of the rule (either below the NFL limits or below the limits of natural deflation). The Wells report chose to say that the Colts footballs were legal (citing the gauge with the higher psi readings) and that the Patriots footballs were illegal (citing the gauge with the lower psi readings). Does that really seem legally sound?
I would assume both the gauges are still available. Wouldn't it be a simple test to verify their accuracy?
The first problem with that idea is that it's unknown as to which gauge was used for the pre game measurements. The second problem is that the investigators never bothered to check with the manufacturers on the margin of error for the two gauges in question. The Patriots rebuttal includes an example of a league tested football that was measured three times with the same gauge and gave a different reading every time…and the difference between them was as large as .4 psi. That by itself calls into question the whole exercise due to the rule book range being only a 1 psi difference between 12.5 and 13.5. If the margin of error can be close to 50% of the rule limit, you've got a problem. How could you possibly claim to know what the pre game psi really was without compensating for the margin of error?