Peter King threw the considerable weight of his Monday Morning Quarterback column behind the notion that Roger Goodell needs to give the Patriots their picks back.
King was motivated to write this piece now by his observation the NFL Combine starts later this week and the Patriots will show up to browse the markdown section since they have no first-round pick. He’s also made this sensible suggestion before.
But, as I’ve written a few times – and King acknowledges himself – regardless of how sensible, just, moral, reasonable and benevolent it would be for Goodell to say, “Oops, looks like we overcharged you here…,” he won’t. He can’t.
The NFL spent about $5 million on the bag-of-dung Wells Report alone. Since that mess dropped, the league’s spent nine months lawyered up and defending itself, first at the Brady appeal in June, then in Judge Richard Berman’s court in August and September and – soon – in appeals court looking for an overturn. Figure the tally has to be up near $12M to $15M on a case that held the NFL’s offseason hostage? So, Goodell – the employee of owners who agitated for the Patriots to have a pound of flesh taken from them – is going to admit the time and money was wasted, the CBA was undermined and the Patriots will skate now? After all this damage has been done?
You think Denver or Carolina – both picking behind where he Patriots would be if the first-rounder was re-instituted – wouldn’t flip out on Goodell? Panthers owner Jerry Richardson would have Goodell’s testicles in a little satchel, especially after the way the NFL undercut Richardson’s efforts to make things right with the Los Angeles situation.
The Patriots had been holding out a glimmer of hope they’d get something back. Their thinking seemed to be that, if PSI numbers the league collected proved the pressure loss was not unusual and that teams played with footballs far under 12.5 PSI on the regular, what basis would there be to keep the punishment in place?
Then Goodell unveiled the bait-and-switch the league decided to do with its PSI data collection. It wouldn’t release it. It wouldn’t analyze it. It was moot. At the pre-Super Bowl press conference, I tried to get Goodell to acknowledge that a football under 12.5 PSI wasn’t a violation as the NFL wholly believed when it jumped ugly at halftime of the AFC Championship Game.
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He ducked, dodged and moved on.
After the press conference, I was told by a high-ranking league official that it wasn’t PSI that was being evaluated but “procedure.” Were the newly-instituted chain-of-football-custody rules followed in 2015? They were, hence, no violations. The Patriots, it was inferred, violated procedure when Jim McNally took the footballs on walkabout and went into a bathroom for 90 seconds.
Even though he walked through the officials’ locker room with the footballs. And past NFL Operations people stationed outside the locker room. And nobody stopped him despite the officials and NFL Ops guys supposedly being on high alert. Never mind the fact there were no “procedures” on the books at that time.
If McNally hadn’t gone into that bathroom, the NFL would have no case. Not that they wouldn’t conjure one anyway.
If you squint, you can see Goodell entertaining the logic of a settlement to salve the wound between the Patriots, himself and the league. But the fallout would be extreme.
Coughing up the picks would trash the NFL Executive Council’s legal fight with the NFLPA. And allow Brady to walk away with his head held high. This fight might not have been about Brady at the beginning, but it became that way when he refused to cooperate with league investigators and the animosity only grew during the summer.
The NFL knows it overcharged the Patriots. It knows that the science doesn’t back it up. But if it’s going to reinstitute those picks it needs to find a way to save face. And without Brady copping to something, anything, the NFL isn’t budging. Period. End of story.
The league is resolute that – even if the footballs from that night didn’t show it – the Patriots dickied with footballs after inspection over the years and are lying about it.
It’s way too late for anybody on the Patriots side to change their story. It’s way too late for the NFL to admit it doesn’t have the goods.