5/19/15 12:15 PM

I bet not, stupid slap on the hand VS the Lance Armstrong UCI style pulling of records and moneys. Which is what SHOULD happen IMO.

Where is Dave Stoller when you need him?


Funny this pisses me off... ;)

5/21/15 5:45 AM

The severity of the penalty for something so small is ridiculous. The Atlanta falcons pumped fake crowd noise into their stadium to make it harder on opponents - which definitely affected the game - but got a much less severe penalty. I guess that it's more OK to cheat when you have a losing record?

Remember that the Pats ownership and management was cleared of any involvement in "deflategate", so why are they getting hammered with the harshest penalty in NFL history?

What this is really all about is a worthless commissioner who's desperately trying to make himself relevant and keep his job. Goodell is a bad joke and he needs to go. That was obvious long before "deflategate".

This BS of Goodell hearing Brady's appeal is another perfect example. Regardless of whether he has the authority to name himself or not, this should be heard by an independent arbitrator. More than likely, it's going to end up being decided in a real court, giving the NFL yet another black eye.

5/21/15 10:48 AM

The football game is not played on the field. Owners are some of the most hard-nosed unsentimental calculating men in the world. All they do is for advantage.

I agree with everything Brian says. The decisions are arbitrary and political (boardroom politics.)

I've heard lately from commentators the penalty for this particular game ball manipulation is $25,000. Not "4 games unpaid, draft picks and a million dollars"

Commissioners, NFL vs NBA: Goodell 100% NFL, from intern to commish. Silver clerked for a bada** judge who sat for Wall St. cases, and then did corp lit for a few years... then started an NBA career. After all that do you think he started as an intern?

5/21/15 11:29 AM

Political overcompensating, sound the the ADA in Baltimore methodology.

I dunno what the 'fine' $24K etc. Is it not like a range depending on severity [cheating in the superbowl arguable severe??]. #25-####?

If it is only 25k, easy to see how it is well spent and hardly any motivation to do it..

5/21/15 3:02 PM

The difference between the Falcons and the Pats is:

1) the Falcons owned up to their mistake & did not make a mockery of the rules when caught

2) the other has a history of serious cheating; reference Rams being cheated out of a Super Bowl, as one example. Eric Mangini could fill you in on the rest...

Kraft/Brady clearly overplayed their hand.

"harshest penalty" - hardly. Much less so than the Saints & bounty gate

5/22/15 3:48 AM

Regarding the Saints, when you have team management conspiring to encourage their players to injure opposing players, that's like Ray Rice x 10.

As for the Rams, I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sounds like some conspiratorial nonsense.

The Pats owned up to "spygate", which was another overblown bunch of nonsense about something that other teams did as well, yet they're still being punished for it. This is much like the fact that many other quarterbacks in the league admittedly changed the air pressure in balls (lower or higher) to suit their personal preferences. They didn't see it as a big deal and the league apparently didn't until now, as evidenced by the minor prescribed fine. I'm sure that teams and QBs just looked at it as a potential cost of doing business.

The Pats are obviously being scapegoated, as the management was exonerated of any wrongdoing . If they didn't do anything wrong, there is nothing to own up to, so why are they being punished for it?

It is the NFL that made this into a huge story by not just imposing their prescribed fine. If they had done that, it would have ended before the Superbowl and nobody would be talking about it now. It's also blatantly obvious that the release of the report and the imposition of the penalties was timed to make sure that Robert Kraft was at the NFL owner's meeting when he had to make the decision whether to appeal or not, so he could be pressured into capitulating.

This is nothing but grandstanding by Goodell. He needs to go, period.

5/22/15 7:13 AM

If you have no idea about the Rams-Patriots Super Bowl history, then you really do not have much of a leg to stand on in this conversation. The NFL did a good job of burying that scandal in favor of the Patriots as part of its effort to protect the "image" of the league.

Tom "Maybe those guys gotta study the rule book and figure it out" Brady played in the Super Bowl. He should have been suspended as the NFL knew he cheated well before then. Of course, that would be bad for the league to do so.

Making a mockery of the cheating and the investigation, before and after the Super Bowl was not wise. The Saints & Falcons owned up once caught. The Pats, including its management continue to deny in light of the evidence well known publicly. The Commissioner serves at the pleasure of the NFL owners, including Robert Kraft, which was taken care of after the Rams were cheated out of a Super Bowl. This time there is too much public information and strong headwinds for the Commissioner to look after one of his bosses, Robert Kraft.

By the way Tom Brady made those comments on Jan 9, 2015, after the Ravens playoffs game, for what they thought was an illegal substitution/formation, which notably was after the inflategate Colts game.

Brady knowingly broke the rules. Not only in the Colts game, but there's hard-core statistics based study to indicate that has been going on for a much longer time (ie outliers on rates of fumbling).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_England_Patriots_videotaping_controversy

5/22/15 7:28 AM

This from the Washington Post not a local Pats fanboy:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/in-trying-to-restore-his-authority-goodell-undermined-his-credibility/2015/05/21/142c8d2c-ffd4-11e4-805c-c3f407e5a9e9_story.html

5/23/15 8:18 AM

Goodell need to go.

5/23/15 10:08 AM

Wash post digs.

Harsh penalty my ars...

5/26/15 7:46 AM

He may suck at personnel issues, but Goodell is a rain maker $ for the owners (his employer), including Kraft.