The three salient points any competent defense of Brady and the Patriots needs to address are these.
1. Did McNally and Jastremski do anything wrong? I.e., did they illegally tamper with the Patriots' footballs after the officials checked the balls? If the answer is no, then this issue is over. If, however, the answer is yes, move to point 2.
2. Did Tom Brady or Bill Belichick tell them to do it, or did they do it on their own? If the answer is no, TB or BB didn't direct or ask them to do it, then the discipline goes to these two guys and maybe the organization as a whole should take a small hit as well, since they are ultimately responsible for their employees. But Brady should get nothing. If the answer is yes, TB and/or BB were involved, move to point 3.
3. What should the punishment for TB and/or BB be? We can factor in issues like "cooperation" and "repeat offenders" if the situation actually warrants.
My replies to these questions.
1. There is certainly a little suspicious evidence that suggests that McNally and/or Jastremski *MIGHT* have done something illegal with the balls. But the fact of the matter is, when Walt Anderson's memory is approached consistently, the use of the logo gauge tells us that the Patriots' footballs were perfectly consistent with what the laws of physics tells us they *should* be given the conditions and initial measurements. So if they tampered, there's really no evidence of it. Occam's Razor tells us not to multiply entities unnecessarily. If a natural cause is sufficient to explain a phenomenon, we don't need to attribute anything else, unless there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There certainly is nothing resembling overwhelming evidence, and a natural explanation works perfectly fine. So it's actually more probable than not that they didn't do anything against the rules here.
2. There certainly is NO evidence AT ALL that Brady or Belichick had anything to do with this. In fact, the direct evidence we do have vis-a-vis Brady is that he was crystal clear that he wanted the footballs at 12.5psi. Never do they refer to him wanting it lower than that. Never does Brady mention any number below that. Never. Ever. The Wells report, after 103 days and 243 pages, could only claim that it is more probable than not that Brady had a "general awareness" of the actions of McNally and Jastremski. That's it.
3. As we've discussed, the penalty meted out to Brady and the Patriots wasn't even CLOSE to what the rulebook or precedent called for. Again:
- Tampering with the football? The Chargers got no penalty. The Panthers got no penalty. The Vikings got no penalty. The rulebook only calls for a $25k fine.
- Not cooperating? Favre got $50k. The Chargers got $20k. New Orleans cooperated fully and still got hammered. This is a non-issue.
- Repeat offender? The Jets were disciplined by the NFL three times from 2010-2015, and the lightest penalty they were given was for the last one (the Revis tampering). Denver was a multiple time offender and were hit with a total penalty of $100,000 for their own Spygate infraction in 2010. And that Spygate infraction was worse than what NE did, AND it came just three years after the Patriots' issue, so you'd think that the league would come down very hard on them for that. Nope.
In other words, no matter how you slice it, the Pats got hammered WAY, WAY outside the bounds of what's reasonable. Tagliabue made this point to Goodell in the Saints' case a few years ago. There was just no justification for Goodell's punishments. Just as there's no justification for these as well.
Any semi-competent judge should see these points clearly. And a fully competent judge will see how this was a railroad job from the beginning, and will issue discipline to the NFL for how they've handled this. The entire thing could have been stopped right at the beginning if Goodell had said, look, the readings of both teams' footballs were consistent with the laws of physics, the whole issue would have gone away.