Yet here we are again, interrupting your regularly scheduled National Football League assault on the year-round sports calendar – this week’s upcoming draft – with another round of legal fisticuffs, one that brought reaction from the ultimate carnival barker Monday, when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump implored the National Football League to “leave Tom Brady alone”.
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It also fuels a fresh round of debate over what role, if any, the quarterback and top NFL star played in using underinflated footballs at the AFC championship game in January 2015.
The decision of two judges of the U.S. Supreme Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to reinstate Tom Brady’s four-game suspension doesn’t end the case.
The ruling came in a 2-1 vote by the three-judge panel, and followed arguments last month where a lawyer for the players’ union faced tough questioning that signaled the likely reversal of U.S. District Judge Richard Berman’s ruling.
Brady loses on many fronts, from the tarnishing of his legacy to those who believe he cheated, to the unfair absence from the season’s first four games to those who believe he didn’t.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell insisted the suspension was deserved.
Sticking pins in his Roger Goodell voodoo doll.
“The NFLPA is disappointed in the decision by the Second Circuit”. If they agree to hear the case, they could grant an injunction to keep the suspension from happening until they have heard the case and ruled on it. If they refuse to hear the case, Brady will have no other option but to serve the suspension.
Because Goodell has “especially broad” authority, they wrote, he had the right to discipline players for “conduct detrimental to the integrity of, or public confidence, in the game of professional football”.
The Patriots have already lost their 2016 first-round pick and a 2017 fourth-round pick and have been fined $1 million as part of the Deflategate punishment.
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Brady and the Patriots adjusted his contract to lessen the financial sting of a four-game suspension in 2016. He would be eligible to make his regular season debut against the Cleveland Browns in Week 5.
