Palladino: Punish Brady And Pats, But Don't Go Nuts Over Silly 'Deflategate'
By Ernie Palladino
» More Ernie Palladino Columns
First, let's step away from the hysterical headlines and scathing denials from Robert Kraft and Tom Brady's agent and put "Deflategate" into its proper perspective.
No women, children, or animals were harmed in the Patriots' latest venture outside the rulebook.
This was not Staten Island, Ferguson or Baltimore, or anything close to an NFL equivalent of those truly sad and tragic events. This was not even a Bountygate redux, where the league found the Saints guilty of putting the health of opposing players at risk.
This was a silly, anti-climactic story that took investigator Ted Wells 243 pages to explain how a couple of silly psi went missing in 11 of 12 footballs in the first half of a playoff game.
Not exactly the stuff of mob legend, one might say. This is not the feds nailing Capone on tax evasion. In fact, the report shows little hard evidence and indicts Brady, one of the greatest quarterbacks in history regardless of this escapade, with a bunch of sentences containing "more than probable" and "unlikely."
Still, players who go outside the rules get penalized, and teams that make a habit of it get fined and lose draft picks. So it will be interesting to see what penalty Commissioner Roger Goodell hands down, not only to a quarterback who in all likelihood cajoled a couple of New England's worker bees into inflating (deflating?) balls to his liking, but to a coach and owner who share a chronic track record of operating outside the rules.
Spygate cost the Pats money and a draft pick. This one, seeing that it involved balls assistant equipment manager Jim McNally tinkered with to make more touch-friendly on that cold, AFC Championship day, could have had a direct effect on the outcome.
It didn't, of course. Anyone with common sense knows that even a vastly under-inflated ball would not account for the Colts getting buried 45-7. The Patriots would have won that game with Brady tossing watermelons.
Placed against the grand scale, this is relatively minor stuff. But it did happen in the course of a game, and that makes it a serious enough matter of integrity for a little more than a fine. Atlanta, for instance, forfeited next year's fifth-round draft pick and was fined $350,000 for piping artificial crowd noise into the Georgia Dome the last two years. Its director of event marketing would have been suspended eight games if Arthur Blank hadn't fired him first. Browns GM Ray Farmer got four games and the franchise was lightened by $250,000 because he sent text messages to his coaches during the game.
The Pats lost their first-round pick and Bill Belichick lost $500,000 over Spygate in 2007.
In another year, even with the Pats' outlaw rep, Brady might have gotten away with a slap on the wrist. But after the kind of season Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson and others laid on the NFL, Goodell and executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent will have no choice but to dole out some sort of punishment, and rightly so.
You cheat, you get caught, you get punished. That's simple.
Much harder is making the punishment fit the crime. The anti-Brady Bunch have fallen just short of calling for expunging his four championships and suspending him until, oh, 2045. That's a bit extreme for this kind of sin. Removing a couple of pounds per square inch from a football doesn't even rise to the severity of scuffing baseballs or getting caught in pine tar bath, ala Michael Pineda.
On the same token, Brady shouldn't get off entirely. He broke the rules. The text messages between McNally and locker room assistant John Jastremski indicate something was up, and Brady played a central role in it.
The report placed no blame on Belichick. He, though, is the head of the organization on the field, so the franchise should take a hit here, too.
Not too much, though. Give Brady the first two games -- one for each missing psi. Fine the club $250,000. Then, call it a day. No loss of draft pick. No suspension or fine for Belichick. No additional fine for Brady.
For all the hysteria surrounding it, Deflategate really isn't that big a deal.