Bob Kraft is a business man - and there aren't any billionaires who haven't mortgaged huge part of their soul at one point or another.
Yesterday was just another business decision for Bob Kraft - its not about Bob 'being weak' or 'lacking spine' - its about Kraft going along with the leagues efforts to handicap the team that has had the good fortune to have the best QB/HC the game has seen.
In short, its about trying to get some parity back in the game - its about letting someone else from the AFCE make the post-season (we don't want to lose those Buffalo/Miami/NYJ fans do we?).
It's best to think of the 32 franchise owners, not as competitors, but as partners in a business venture - 31 fanbases are overjoyed - 31 fanbases have increased their odds of winning the Superbowl.
One fanbase is going to bellyache a whole lot - but eventually get straight back in line and buy NFL merch, watch NFL games.....at least this is how Kraft et al think the plebs will react.
Good business, in short.
Anyone who thinks that Kraft accepted this team punishment to lower Brady's is delusional - I would not be surprised that this be taken as a green light to increase Brady's punishment to 8 games after his appeal is rejected.
What you see on the field might not be the WWE fix that some might believe, but what transpires between the 32 partners absolutely is.
The question is, do you really want to be a part of that?
Personally, after 26 years as a fan - i'm likely done - i'll always appreciate the greatness of Belichick and Brady - and i'll enjoy watching my 3GTG DVD's - but watching football on a Sunday is tacitly agreeing with the pantomime that the NFL has become...and thats something i'm not prepared to do.
All the best.
Livinginthepast, you nailed it. There is no more spot on thread related to this whole deflategate mess than what you have posted here.
After the betrayal by Sponge Bob it has become clear to me what this league is all about and actually helps explain so many of the inequities that we are seeing, particularly in regards to unequal treatment of teams when discipline is imposed.
The only team other than the Pats to be hammered during the Goodell Era of Omission, is the New Orleans Saints. When they got slammed for Bountygate they were a recent Superbowl winner and among the elite teams.
You don't bring parity back into the league if you rule only on the offense, because the well-run teams avoid the offenses, sometimes, as with the Pats, you need to manufacture an offense, like Deflategate, when the target team insists on winning and making sound decisions that only help their teams get better.
From what we know now, were the Pats the first unwitting victims whose consistent excellence had made them a target as soon as Roger Goodell took over as Omissioner? Was Spygate not merely an opportunity to take the Pats down a notch, but an actual planned event? I am not saying that the league new they could catch the Pats taping from an unauthorized location, although they may have had a good idea that that would be one of their likely opportunities, but that the league had the Pats' excellence in their cross hairs and they were going to find something to nail them on if it wasn't Spygate.
After Spygate it looks like the Pats really made an effort to avoid doing anything that could put them in that compromised position again, only to have an invented offense, in Deflategate, when the league couldn't find anything legitimate.
Now on the other side of the parity coin we see the numerous non-punishments for similar offenses.
The Rats were caught in Foxborough, during the 2006 season, taping, as the Pats did in Spygate, from an unauthorized location. The Rats claimed that they had permission, the Pats said they did not, but no punishment was leveled on the Rats.
After Spygate the Denver Broncos were caught actually doing what the Pats were accused of, but cleared of, taping another team's practice when they taped the 49ers in London.
I remember visiting Broncos message boards at that time and the fans were seriously concerned about how badly they were going to get hammered, since there was already a perceived precedent.
In the end the Broncos were only fined $100,000. Did I mention it was the 5-11 Denver Broncos?
We all know that the Vikings and Panthers were caught last season, heating up balls on the sidelines. That violates the same rule that the Pats were accused of breaking in Deflategate. The league told them to knock it off. No punishment issued.
After two other incidents of tampering that Goodell had set a punishment precedent on, he then ruled on the Revis tampering case with a mindnumbingly lenient $100,000 penalty. It really feels like it was a deliberate effort to mock and insult the Pats.
Based on the punishment precedent that Goodell had previously established, along with the blatentness of the tampering, the quality of the player tampered with, and the fact that the tampering team succeeded in getting the player they tampered with, the penalty should have been in the range of a lost 3rd or 4th round pick, and then a swap of 2nd or 1st round picks, instead, after months of deliberation, and a counter-tampering charge against the Pats that should have been seen as making a mockery of the rules against tampering and made the punishment worse, a mere $100,000 penalty was the ruling.
Bad teams do not get hammered by the league, that is counterproductive to the goal of parity.
The league WILL however, hammer teams like the Pats for minor offenses, like Spygate, and manufactured ones like Deflategate, and it is no coincidence that each incident resulted in stripping the Pats of a 1st round draft pick, because when everything is boiled down to the basics, there is no more effective way to level the playing field than to deprive a team of the opportunity to acquire difference makers in the draft.
Consider too that if Goodell had ruled on the merits of the offense, it would have made the Pats even stronger and the Rats weaker. Not good for parity.
Amazingly the Pats under BB and Brady have been able to overcome such hamstringing previously, so now the league has no option but to take tougher measures to try and force the Pats into mediocrity.
Please Tom, do not settle with the league on your suspension. Take them to court and win the most important game you will ever face in your career.
