Conspiracy states that Goodell is the puppet of those who want to push the Patriots into the state of mediocrity. That failed twice in the last three years. Deflategate failed. Are the puppet masters happy? They're not.
I think Goodell is in the hot seat.
Btw: How good are BB and TB when the league is against you and you still win?
That last part is an interesting discussion point. How much more could the Patriots have accomplished over the last 17 years if the league wasn't putting obstacles in their way? What records could have been achieved if Brady was given the Peyton Manning treatment? What more could have been done if the team had their 2008 and 2015 1st round picks? I think the franchise has been on the best run in league history, but it's kind of scary to think it could have been even better.
As for Florio, I think that his stance that the NFL has been wrong in their treatment of the Patriots carries a lot more weight that someone like Mike Silver saying the league was right.
Florio had no problem finding negative angles about the Patriots to get more eyes on his stories. I remember him questioning if Chad Eaton's story about Belichick giving him some extra cash to start fights in training camp constituted a salary cap violation. And questioning if the New England was breaking the rules by putting Jeff Demps on IR when his knee injury didn't look that bad on the field. And claiming the Patriots violated Kyle Love's human rights by cutting him due to his diabetic condition.
PFT would find a negative spin on Patriots news in a lot of cases because they knew it would get more readers than just a straight story. When someone who operated that way looked at deflategate and decided it didn't add up, that should have been a pretty big warning bell to everyone that the story was BS. If it was legit, Florio would have run with it and mined it for more stories since then. Instead, he did the opposite, which means a lot more than someone like Jerry Thornton knocking the story.
