Deflategate differences from other NFL discipline messes?

[Fencer]

We all know that the NFL has been wildly inconsistent in disciplinary matters under Goodell, and has lost some court/neutral arbitration cases when disciplinary matters have gotten that far. But I'd like to raise a difference between Deflategate and most of those other cases, and ask people -- especially those of the shyster persuasion -- whether or not they think it's significant.

In most other NFL disciplinary cases, the facts are rather settled.

• That's generally true by the time they penalize somebody for domestic violence, DUI or other non-football-related crimes.
• It's also true of the Saints bounty case and the Dolphin bullying problems. In both those cases, locker room talk went too far, and scope of disagreement was about whether that's a small deal (locker room is hyperbolic under any circumstances) or a big one (some of the things said and done were, in a vacuum, pretty awful, so is the normal locker room hyperbole really any kind of excuse?).

I say all that not to reopen the discussions, but just to memorialize where the major disagreements fell.

In this case, the facts themselves are in doubt.

• The penalties assume a pattern of sticking needles into footballs to deflate them below allowable pressure levels.
• In fact, there's negligible evidence that such deflation ever happened.

My concern is that if you lose a court case, and you go to an appeals court and show that the judge made a legal error, there's a good chance you'll win. But if you lose a court case and appeal on grounds that the lower court made incorrect findings of fact, you have a much lower chance of getting satisfaction.