Hurley: Roger Goodell, NFL Land Major Blow In Attacking Tom Brady's Credibility
BOSTON (CBS) -- With all of the sports world watching, the high-stakes game of chicken between Roger Goodell and Tom Brady advanced further on Tuesday afternoon.
The NFL commissioner decided that, after taking a month to think about it, he was right all along for issuing a four-game suspension to the Patriots quarterback.
The news should come as no surprise.
As soon as the NFLPA leaked that it would take Goodell and the NFL to court if even one game remained on the suspension after the appeal process, the strategy had to change for the commissioner. At that point, it's likely that his legal team suggested not only that the suspension must remain at four games in order to stand any chance in federal court, but also that there must be very good reason for the decision.
And on that latter point, Goodell sure did find good reason.
The league claims that shortly before Brady was due to meet with Ted Wells' investigation team, he destroyed his cell phone after getting a new one. According to the league's release, Brady claimed this is his common practice when getting a new phone. The NFL said that Brady's representatives disclosed this information on June 18 -- five days before Brady met with Goodell in New York for the appeal hearing.
Of course, any and all communications Brady had with Patriots employees John Jastremski and/or Jim McNally were retrievable when the Wells team scanned the employees' phones. So it stands to reason that the NFL suspects Brady of communicating with other parties who may have had awareness about the handling of the footballs.
It goes without saying that if this story is indeed true -- and the note that Brady's representatives were the ones to disclose this information speaks to its validity -- it casts more reasonable suspicion on Brady. To demolish a phone that figures to be a piece of evidence just before you meet with an investigator looks shady, to say the least.
Yet, it's important to parse the commissioner's ruling with the same level of rightful suspicion. When the league released the Wells report in May, it did so knowing the "more probable than not" and "at least generally aware" in the first few pages would generate the immediate headlines. It was Goodell's way of directing the story.
In the hours and days that followed, of course, the numerous holes in the 243-page Wells report came to light, and most who read the full document found the conclusions to rely on faulty logic and science.
In that situation, the league learned that public perception is more powerful than anything else, so it would not be surprising that the same tactic was applied for this news release.
But again, if the NFL is being 100 percent truthful in its release, then things look awfully bad for Tom Brady.
Also working against Brady is the NFL's assertion that Brady and the NFLPA chose to not call Jastremski or McNally to testify at the appeals hearing. Brady's explanation for a sudden uptick in communications with Jastremski -- that the two were discussing "breaking in balls" despite having not communicated via phone much in the previous six months -- is not very believable.
Of course, if you dig a little deeper in the release and investigate the footnotes, you find a bit more. For months, people have parroted the NFL's insistence that Wells' team did not want Brady's phone, but rather very specific communications. Those specifications were laid out in a footnote on Tuesday: all texts from September through February that involved game-ball preparation discussions, as well as all text messages and call logs with Jastremski, Dave Schoenfeld and Jim McNally. Again, the Wells team did have access to Brady's communications with McNally and Jastremski, so the scope of exactly what Brady might have been hiding from investigators was certainly limited.
Brady's reps also offered to provide the NFL with a spreadsheet that listed "all of the individuals with whom Mr. Brady had exchanged text messages during that period; the agents suggested that the League could contact those individuals and request production of any relevant text messages that they retained." The league opted to pass at the opportunity, with Goodell saying doing that legwork was "simply not practical."
The release on Tuesday focuses heavily on the destruction of Brady's cell phone ... yet it also explains that such information was not available when Goodell first issued a four-game suspension. At the very least, something seems off.
Goodell admitted that such a punishment is unprecedented, but that he is still empowered to make it. He also seemingly admitted that he waited for Harold Henderson to rule on Greg Hardy's suspension appeal before carefully wording this decision.
"In the Hardy opinion, Hearing Officer Henderson went on to say, 'The Commissioner's authority and discretion in deciding appropriate discipline is not circumscribed or limited by the CBA, and he is not forever bound to hold discipline at the same level,'" Goodell wrote in the footnotes. "There is no 'usual level of discipline' because the conduct detrimental at issue in this proceeding is fundamentally different from the conduct detrimental at issue in any other proceeding."
Goodell also addressed the much-discussed $50,000 punishment of Brett Favre several years ago for refusing to give his phone to NFL investigators. The difference, Goodell asserted, is that while Favre's alleged sexual harassment of a team employee reflected poorly on the league, it did not affect "the integrity of the competition on the field."
Goodell did get himself into a small bind when addressing the Vikings-Panthers sideline football violations. In that instance, ball boys were shown on TV holding footballs near the heaters. Rather than issue unprecedented fines, the NFL merely wrote a letter to the teams to tell them that such conduct was not allowed.
In Tuesday's ruling, Goodell cited the lack of "player involvement" as a chief differentiator in that case. Yet earlier in the same ruling, Goodell repeated Wells' assertion that no manipulation of footballs would take place without the quarterback requesting it.
Then, Goodell unearthed an incident that hadn't made the rounds nationally -- a Jets employee who was suspended "longer than the suspension under review here" for attempting to use unapproved equipment in plain view of the officials to prepare kicking balls. Goodell included this employee suspension to show that punishment need not stop at $25,000 for football manipulation.
Goodell said that the closest parallel he cold find for a punishment for knowing about football manipulation would be the first violation for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. He might have a hard time arguing that case.
In sum, it was a carefully constructed ruling on the part of Goodell, one that factored in the commissioner's many missteps in previous rulings in hopes of having this one stand up in federal court. But it must be stated that, obviously, it was a very one-sided document. According to Goodell, the only new information Brady brought to his appeal was that he destroyed his cell phone in early March. That hardly seems like a winning strategy from Brady, Jeffrey Kessler and the NFLPA, so there will be much to learn when transcripts of that hearing are eventually made public. Clearly, the 10-hour session covered more than just the phone.
With news breaking shortly after Goodell's announcement that Brady will indeed be taking this to court, we now wait for the next dozen or so developments to break over the next few months.
The NFL and Goodell launched a major attack on Brady and the quarterback's credibility on Tuesday, but this war is far from over.
Read more from Michael Hurley by clicking here. You can email him or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.