For fans of Tom Brady, part two of his fight with the NFL was not much better than part one.
For fans of Tom Brady, part two of his fight with the NFL was not much better than part one.
Brady’s four-game suspension, imposed in May, was upheld by Commissioner Roger Goodell on Tuesday. By Wednesday, the shocking disclosure that Brady ordered his phone destroyed rather than risk sharing text messages held within it had become a granite wall that would not let truth, facts or even discussion in or out.
Even for the fiercest Brady fan, this has to be slightly disconcerting. Months of complaints about a witch hunt against their beloved quarterback or the misapplication of the commissioner’s power were swiftly overwhelmed by the disturbing image of Brady, a three-time Super Bowl most valuable player, ordering the destruction of evidence on the day he was supposed to meet with NFL investigators.
Had someone suggested on Monday that the Brady suspension might be reduced I would have been disappointed but not surprised. But knowing what we now know, he should feel fortunate that the suspension wasn’t lengthened. I would have suspended Brady for the season.
“It’s what your mother told you,” Ron Katz, the chairman of the Institute of Sports Law and Ethics at Santa Clara University, said Wednesday. “You do something wrong, own up to it and go forward.”
I first spoke with Katz last May after the NFL announced its penalty against Brady. The issue then was largely about maintaining the integrity of competition.
With the disclosure about the phone, everything changes — including the perception of Brady.
“The point is that now we’ve now gone to a different level,” Katz said. “The cover-up level.”
In fact, the Patriots’ owner, Robert K. Kraft, said Wednesday that he had expected a reduced suspension in response to Brady’s appeal.
“It is routine for discipline in the NFL to be reduced upon appeal,” Kraft said. “In the vast majority of these cases, there is tangible and hard evidence of the infraction for which the discipline is being imposed, and still the initial penalty gets reduced.”
Kraft also complained that the NFL, in upholding the suspension, was playing to the crowd.
“Yesterday’s decision by Commissioner Goodell was released in a similar manner under an erroneous headline that read, ‘Tom Brady Destroyed His Cellphone,’ Kraft said. “This headline was designed to capture headlines across the country and obscure the fact the NFL still has no hard evidence regarding the tampering of air pressure in footballs.”
Kraft is right. The headline blew us away. Noncooperation is one thing. Doing something that borders on obstruction of (league) justice is something else.
On Wednesday, raging anew at the penalty, Kraft doubled down on his faith in Brady and then said, “I was wrong to put my faith in the league.”
But isn’t Kraft, and aren’t the Patriots, part of the league? His lament suggests a detachment that may be at the root of the problem with the Patriots and with Brady.
The franchise had been caught — and punished — in an earlier cheating scandal involving the videotaping of an opponent’s signals. It had been accused of bending different rules with its formations last season. Now this. There is an approach to winning that allows for stretching the rules, and now and then perhaps even breaking them. But that approach does not come with immunity.
“It just shows some surreal sense of invulnerability,” Katz said.
Late Wednesday, the players’ union took its case to federal court in Minnesota. Brady has said that he was “very disappointed” by the NFL’s decision to uphold his suspension, but he did not deny having the phone destroyed.
“To suggest that I destroyed a phone to avoid giving the NFL information it requested is completely wrong,” he said.
But why do it? Why destroy the phone on the day you are meeting with investigators?
There are myriad legal questions. For now, those will continue to be overshadowed by ethical questions, not only for Brady but for those fans who blindly follow, embrace and defend him in the face of conduct that they surely would not accept from others.
“He would have been much better off just accepting the four games and going on with his life,” Katz said. “Now he’s made things much worse for himself.”
In the coming days and weeks there will be finger-pointing, saber-rattling and legal posturing. But even if he wriggles free, Brady’s reputation and his legacy have taken a tremendous hit.
He should have done what most quarterbacks learn to do in the face of an untenable situation, what he has done many times when there was no way out on the field. He should have taken the sack.