Hurley On T&R: Hard To Fully Believe Anything Released By Goodell, NFL
BOSTON (CBS) -- With everyone still digesting Roger Goodell's 20-page ruling to uphold Tom Brady's four-game suspension, CBSBostonSports.com's Michael Hurley joined Toucher & Rich in studio on Wednesday.
Hurley wrote on Tuesday afternoon that if everything the NFL stated is 100 percent true, then Brady looks remarkably guilty. Yet, has the NFL been straightforward at all throughout this entire fiasco?
"I don't believe them. I don't know how you could read anything the NFL releases without a heavy dose of skepticism. Look at what they did with the Wells report. They put on the second page of a 240-page report, 'Tom Brady was generally aware that this was going on,' and that was the headline everywhere within five minutes across the entire country: Tom Brady Knew About Cheating. And so this time, they knew that the country really hooked onto that cell phone, the lack of cooperation, What's he hiding if he didn't give up his cell phone? Despite the fact he didn't have to give up his cell phone and shouldn't have given up his cell phone, the country just jumped on that. ... So they knew that that would take off again with this yesterday. And they nailed it, they did a good job with what they wanted to do.
"It's a PR battle, and [the NFL is] dominating."
Fred Toucher, who maybe irked some Patriots fans for thinking like the rest of the country on Wednesday morning, asked Hurley, "If you're Brady, why not just say, 'Listen, I like the balls at a certain level, I don't handle the balls, I didn't go in the bathroom with the balls, I couldn't tell during the game'? ... He never copped to the fact that they were underinflated. He never said that there was a mistake. He could have done it at the time."
"Well, that's what a lot of people say -- what would have happened was a speeding ticket and now you're going to jail over it," Hurley said. "But if you think of the atmosphere that night. Mike Kensil is in the officials' locker room at halftime, reportedly telling [Patriots employees] 'We (expletive) got you' on the sidelines. This was not going to be a slap on the wrist [if they admitted to underinflated footballs]."
While Hurley said Goodell did a very good job with his careful wording in the ruling, it was not without faults.
"What about the fact that Brady's camp claims that they were willing to give up a spreadsheet of everyone he communicated with, and the NFL came back to say, 'Well that's not practical'? Nothing has been practical," Hurley said. "This has been six months. It took Goodell a month to say, 'I was right all along.'"
Listen to the full discussion below: