In the big picture, I gotta say, I'm leaning less toward "the NFL was out to get us" and more toward Hanlon's Razor: Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. The entire process was fucked from start to finish. No one had any idea about what happens to air pressure or how to measure it. Someone in the NFL front office was given completely wrong PSI numbers, but no one knows where they came from. So yeah, there were plenty of folks who automatically assumed that Patriots were doing something nefarious, but if there really were footballs deflated to 10.1 psi, then a lot of reasonable people would have done the same. And the NFL has proven that they have absolutely no clue how to run a proper investigation. They wouldn't know "due process" if it bit them in the ass. And Goodell is clearly uninterested in the mistakes made by his staff. But I'm not sure the outcome would have been a whole lot different if it were some other team. Then Wells comes in and bring all of his own biases as a defense attorney, not to mention his long history of twisting the truth on behalf of his big-money clients. Ultimately, his opinions are as valid as anyone else's -- the problem was the NFL had no way of distinguishing the facts of the situation from Wells's opinion, and no one wanted to take the effort to think independently and question whether one man's opinion really provide sufficient basis for punishment. It was just, Wells said Brady did something wrong, so we have to punish him. That's it.
And now we find out that the Ravens started the mess because they thought something funny was happening with the K-balls. They may have been right -- except that it was the crooked ref swapping out the balls, not anything the Patriots were doing. And we all know that the Colts are a bunch of whiners, so it's no surprise that they bought into it. To some extent, it's just gamesmanship, which would be no big deal until someone goes blabbing to Kravitz after the game was over. That's what started the shitstorm, and clearly the NFL had no idea how to handle it. No one understood what happened, so Goodell sends in the hired goods at NFL Security, but of course they make a complete mess of the situation. I'm sure Goodell thought that the whole thing would be resolved in a week, so he probably didn't mind the publicity, since it drove up interest in the Super Bowl. He probably figured it was a one-week story that would blow over once NFL Security finished talking to folks. But he totally underestimated the complexity of the situation, and he naively trusted his internal investigators would clear thing up from him (and the public at large) before they flew to Arizona for the Super Bowl.
The worst thing that the NFL did was to smear Brady and the Patriots through a one-sided PR campaign. That was (and is) pure evil. But really, would things be a whole heck of a lot different today if that didn't happen? I'm not so sure any more.
Someone, please convince me that I'm wrong. I've spent the last three months believing that this was all biased and pre-judged against the Patriots from the beginning. Now it's starting to feel like the whole thing was so fucked that it was basically a coin flip as to whether it would have led to punishment or exoneration. Am I crazy to think that Brady and the Patriots were just collateral damage from what was almost entirely a matter of gross incompetence and a broken investigation/punishment system?
And now we find out that the Ravens started the mess because they thought something funny was happening with the K-balls. They may have been right -- except that it was the crooked ref swapping out the balls, not anything the Patriots were doing. And we all know that the Colts are a bunch of whiners, so it's no surprise that they bought into it. To some extent, it's just gamesmanship, which would be no big deal until someone goes blabbing to Kravitz after the game was over. That's what started the shitstorm, and clearly the NFL had no idea how to handle it. No one understood what happened, so Goodell sends in the hired goods at NFL Security, but of course they make a complete mess of the situation. I'm sure Goodell thought that the whole thing would be resolved in a week, so he probably didn't mind the publicity, since it drove up interest in the Super Bowl. He probably figured it was a one-week story that would blow over once NFL Security finished talking to folks. But he totally underestimated the complexity of the situation, and he naively trusted his internal investigators would clear thing up from him (and the public at large) before they flew to Arizona for the Super Bowl.
The worst thing that the NFL did was to smear Brady and the Patriots through a one-sided PR campaign. That was (and is) pure evil. But really, would things be a whole heck of a lot different today if that didn't happen? I'm not so sure any more.
Someone, please convince me that I'm wrong. I've spent the last three months believing that this was all biased and pre-judged against the Patriots from the beginning. Now it's starting to feel like the whole thing was so fucked that it was basically a coin flip as to whether it would have led to punishment or exoneration. Am I crazy to think that Brady and the Patriots were just collateral damage from what was almost entirely a matter of gross incompetence and a broken investigation/punishment system?