It doesn’t make sense why the NFL sold out Tom Brady

Deflate-gate has been bad for just about everyone involved. Except the lawyers and their billable hours.

The league mishandled the situation, Ted Wells probably would give back all the millions he got from the NFL just so his name wasn’t mentioned in the news cycle anymore, commissioner Roger Goodell gave his critics more fuel and the NFL tarnished its Super Bowl champion. Pretty thorough job. All over a fairly minor controversy that was, as Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel pointed out so well, “a molehill the NFL turned into a mountain.”

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But the weirdest part is why the NFL chose to rip apart Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, arguably the greatest quarterback in league history, who had been ideal for the league and its growth this century.

And make no mistake, the NFL made that choice. There are enough holes in the Wells report that Goodell could have chosen to go about this in an entirely different way. I’m not talking about looking the other way. I’m talking about realizing there was no evidence of Brady’s wrongdoing and giving someone with a clean record in such matters the benefit of the doubt. The NFL instead said that Brady talking to equipment man John Jastremski on the phone and texting him a dozen times after the story first broke was a sign of his guilt, which makes it seem like they came to a conclusion first and then found the narrative to fit it. The NFL made Brady out to be the bad guy, using him to win public favor with the destroyed cell phone nonsense.

(Look, I hear you yelling at me, Patriots/Brady critics. You made up your mind in January and it hasn’t changed. You were gullible enough to fall for the NFL’s destroyed cell phone red herring, when it had nothing to do with anything. You decided long ago what happened —even though Wells couldn’t find anything in months of investigating, you know all the facts — and you won’t change your mind. To you Brady is the biggest cheatingest cheaty cheat in NFL history … even though you can’t tell me what he did. I get it. Thanks for the input.)

When Patriots owner Robert Kraft was apologizing to the fans for accepting the NFL’s punishment and attacking Goodell, he also was incredulous over how the NFL painted Brady as a villain, especially by shifting the focus to the inconsequential destroyed cell phone.

“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 said. “It intentionally implied nefarious behavior and minimized the acknowledgement that Tom provided the history of every number he texted during the relevant time frame. And we had already provided the league with every cellphone of every non-NFLPA employee that they requested, including head coach Bill Belichick.

“Tom Brady is a person of great integrity and is a great ambassador of the game, both on and off the field. Yet, for reasons that I cannot comprehend, there are those in the league office who are more determined to prove that they were right rather than admit any culpability of their own or take any responsibility for the initiation of a process and ensuing investigation that was flawed.”

(AP) Brady has been lumped in with Spygate over the last few months, but that was a Belichick production, not Brady. Brady wasn’t so much as fined for that ordeal. If you want to get into Brady leaving Bridget Moynahan for Gisele, that’s fine, though I’d rather not do the TMZ thing here. Even when Brady was fined $10,000 for kicking Baltimore Ravens safety Ed Reed when he slid too hard in a game, he called Reed to apologize. For all purposes related to deflate-gate, Brady’s record was clean and this should have been treated as a first offense if the league found any evidence of specific wrongdoing. Which it didn’t. This is not someone you’d think the NFL would be out to get, but that’s what happened for whatever reason.

So perhaps the most famous player in the NFL (and the one that sold the most merchandise for the NFL in the last quarter), a great story of a player who was drafted in the sixth round yet still became the third quarterback to win four Super Bowls, was sold out by the league. Made an example of. Keep in mind that, as Bill Simmons pointed out, the Falcons were found to have pumped in crowd noise over 2013 and 2014 and were stripped of a fifth-round pick. The Patriots were fined $1 million, lost a first-round pick and a fourth-round pick, and their quarterback who never had caused the league any trouble before was suspended the same as busted steroid cheats and Greg Hardy, who was involved in a domestic violence incident. I don’t know how the NFL reconciles all that in its head. The only other known penalty for lack of cooperation was Brett Favre, and he was fined $50,000. And Brady did cooperate, answering every question, he just didn’t turn over his personal communication that the NFL has no right to. Also, again, there’s still no explanation or evidence to what Brady’s role was, if any, in this fiasco. He has maintained complete innocence, though because the NFL has made this into a big deal, all of us have heard some talking head say, “I don’t know why he doesn’t just tell the truth!” Unbelievable.

So this is where deflate-gate has brought us. Perhaps the greatest quarterback ever and one of the most popular players in league history will be stuck with this controversy for as long as we talk about him. Brady has done great things for the NFL and its bottom line, then the NFL turned on him for a public-relations bump. That’s pretty sad.

The whole fiasco is probably a good warning to all players: No matter how good you are to the league, just look at what the NFL did to Brady’s reputation. If the NFL will do that to Brady, one of its pillars, it sure as heck wouldn’t hesitate to do it to you, too.