Tom Brady posted the below message on Facebook today, putting an end to Deflategate once and for all.
It’s hard to believe this thing dragged on for as long as it did, and you can revisit all the choice Deflategate posts from PatsPropaganda here. The 2014 AFC Championship seems like a lifetime ago now.
While it will suck not to have Brady for the first four games of the season, and my disgust for the NFL’s handling of the entire affair burns brighter than ever, I’m glad to get away from labor law. This blog has always been a football-first blog. Now we can go back to that. In fact, it really already started yesterday, taking a look at how Garoppolo is better prepared than Matt Cassel was in 2008, but faces a far more daunting slate of games.
Brady will sit those four games, one more lost draft pick will go by in April of 2017 and then Deflategate can fade into a footnote of Brady’s career. But it certainly sets the stage for one more necessary championship run. That fifth Super Bowl means everything now. Not only would it put Brady in a class by himself as a quarterback, it forces Roger Goodell to hand over the Lombardi trophy to Tom’s awaiting hands one more time.
That might be a hollow victory, watching Goodell Bot act like it’s no big deal. Like it was all business. That Brady doesn’t want to murder him. But it would mean something to all the Patriots fans who have passionately defended Brady from the start to get one more moment like that.
Now we can move on. Kind of. There will always be the idiots who make air pressure jokes. Who think this was about the Patriots and Brady cheating and not a corrupt NFL office. But when the NFL punishment circus comes their team’s way all we can say is “told ya”. I think more and more fans are aware of this now. John Cena’s joke at the ESPY’s confirmed that for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00sRBDl1J2I
This is really nothing new for Patriots fans. We got through it with Spygate and we’ll get through it with Deflategate. Because we have the best coach, quarterback and team in the NFL and their run is not yet over.
I leave you with the first ever piece I wrote that got any internet attention. I wrote it over eight years ago and it’s just as true as ever.
Embrace the hate. We’re Darth Vader. And the rest of the NFL is living on Alderaan.
Hey Mike,
Always loved the blog.
I’m also very interested in contributing the occasional Patriots based article.
Below is my take on the ramifications of the Brady decision.
(I believe you have read this previously)
BRADY’S DEFEAT
The Legal Ramifications
In MLB. v. Garvey, Justice Stevens started his dissent with,
It is well settled that an arbitrator “does not sit to dispense his own brand of industrial justice.” Steelworkers v. Enterprise Wheel & Car Corp., 363 U. S. 593, 597 (1960). We have also said fairly definitively, albeit in dicta, that a court should remedy an arbitrator’s “procedural aberrations” by vacating the award and remanding for further proceedings. Paperworkers v. Misco, Inc., 484 U. S. 29, 40–41, n. 10 (1987). Our cases, however, do not provide significant guidance as to what standards a federal court should use in assessing whether an arbitrator’s behavior is so untethered to either the agreement of the parties or the factual record so as to constitute an attempt to “dispense his own brand of industrial justice.” Nor, more importantly, do they tell us how, having made such a finding, courts should deal with “the extraordinary circumstance in which the arbitrator’s own rulings make clear that, more than being simply erroneous, his finding is completely inexplicable and borders on the irrational.”
Have Stevens’ fears been realized?
What possible evidence could Brady provide that would prove that Goodell and the NFL’s behavior is “untethered” or that the their findings are “inexplicable and border on the irrational”?
Someone accused of murder could produce a live body.
Someone accused of bank robbery could show that nothing from the bank was stolen.
Someone accused of deflating footballs could show data evidencing that the drop in air pressure was due to natural physical occurrences.
David Goodstein, (who was the Vice-provost of Caltech, where he is also an applied physics professor, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor) writes that,
“The things that science has taught us about how the world works are the most secure elements in all of human knowledge. I must distinguish here between science at the frontiers of knowledge (where by definition we don’t yet understand everything and where theories are indeed vulnerable) and textbook science that is known with great confidence.”
The ideal gas law is not at the frontier of knowledge. It is in textbooks and is a basic law of thermodynamics.
If arbitrator’s may ignore “the most secure elements in all of human knowledge”, is there any imaginable piece of evidence that an arbitrator couldn’t ignore?
Seriously, what more could a falsely accused person provide?
Can you imagine any possible piece of evidence that would prove Brady’s innocence in the mind of Goodell and all those who believe he cheated?
If not, then their belief that Brady cheated is a blind faith that cannot be perturbed by any evidence or scientific facts.
The ramifications of this ruling for the NFLPA are difficult to comprehend.