You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The NFL suspending Tom Brady for 4 games.
Really?
That’s a quarter of the season.
That would be like your boss suspending you for 90 days because you took some paper clips home.
Suspending someone for a quarter of their season, for something analogous to spilling peanut butter on the counter top and not wiping it up?
Give me a damn break.
The NFL is today’s sporting version of Plutocracy.
Another scoop of Grey Poupon for you Mr. Goodell?
The fine is excessive. The draft picks plucked are punitive. The suspension is egregiously demonstrative.
The NFL is the old man guarding his lawn from teenagers.
“Get off my lawn,” the NFL yells trying to act tough.
Deflategate was a distraction last year. Now it’s a joke.
It makes me think the NFL is asleep at the wheel, picking and choosing what issues to champion and which debacles to crack the whip.
I don’t like the Patriots. I don’t like Tom Brady. I got my own problems, I’m a Cowboys fan.
I’m just saying, I don’t agree with the sanctions.
And I am especially curious why one man in a team sport takes the full brunt of any punishment.
Sure he’s the quarterback. Sure he gets the big paycheck and all the girls.
But in this case he also gets a national spanking and it seems heavy-handed. It seems like a chance for the NFL to make up for a year worth of mistakes by making an example of the sports number one franchise and its marquee player.
I can hear them in the NFL board room now. “Hey, let’s come down hard on Brady and the Patriots. We’ll look tough and everyone will forget about our tepid response to Ray Rice beating the hell out of his wife in an elevator. Maybe if we excoriate Brady and owner, Bob Kraft, maybe they’ll forget how we blew a myriad of other sensitive issues like drug use, Domestic Abuse, concussion syndrome and the number one pick being accused of rape.”
In case you missed it; The NFL just suspended superbowl champion Tom Brady for 1/4 of the season. He’ll be benched and lose his salary for those games. The NFL also took a 1st and 4th round draft pick. And the team was fined 1 million dollars.
This is all a result of Deflategate, the long-winded investigation into how much air pressure was in footballs used by the Patriots during the AFC championship game last year.
The commission studying this very important issue decided that there was more than probable evidence that Tom Brady and the Patriots knew about the deflated balls prior to the game.
OK.
So what?
There’s cheating on every play in football. Some people say if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.
The NFL changes its philosophical direction more than a homeless man with a 20 dollar bill.
Now it’s all about integrity.
The commission defends itself asserting that Brady and his “people” could have been more cooperative in the investigation.
Maybe they could have. But last time I checked, this is America, and unless compelled by law, you don’t have to comply with any witch hunt.
The Integrity of the game? The NFL is hiding behind this lofty ideal like a murky iceberg floating in a North Atlantic shipping channel.
Why only penalize Brady? Why not penalize every wide receiver who touched a deflated ball? Why not fine every running back who touched a football with less than perfect air pressure. What about the center? He is the first guy to touch the ball on every play. Shouldn’t he be fined or suspended? Didn’t the center get an unfair advantage gripping the ball, hiking it back through his legs to the quarterback?
I can see some level of NFL discipline here. But the sanctions are ferocious.
This is the equivalent to screaming “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS” for using the wrong dinner fork.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid used the news to blast the NFL for its lack of action on the Washington Redskins’ name. “Yesterday, the National Football League punished one of its most recognizable players for having tampered with game balls. “The Redskins name is a racist name. So I wish the commissioner would act as swiftly and decisively in changing the name of the DC team as he did about not enough air in a football.”
Donald Trump was on ESPN today blasting Roger Goodell and the NFL for being way to harsh. He publicly decried the punishment admonishing Tom Brady to sue the NFL for 250 million dollars.
“People are so jealous of Tom Brady and the Patriots. No court could convict based on the evidence. They can’t beat him on the field, so this,” Trump said.
The NFL needs to get a gyroscope and stabilize itself. The NFL needs to take Ritalin and mellow out its chirpy little buzz that keeps it bouncing off the insane asylum walls.
Hey Roger, you want to deflate something?
How about your ego.
It seems to have lost its way.
Life’s Crazy™