Patriots' excuses weigh thin in DeflateGate scandal
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, May 17, 2015, 12:16 AM
Mike Lupica
You know who knows everything about those 11 under-inflated footballs at the AFC Championship Game and DeflateGate? Jim McNally and John Jastremski, that’s who. They’re the equipment guys who used to work for the New England Patriots, who continue to say this is all one big misunderstanding.
But if it really is just a big misunderstanding, then why were McNally and Jastremski suspended, and not just for four games, suspended indefinitely, by the Patriots?
McNally and Jastremski were suspended the day Ted Wells’ report on DeflateGate was released. Only now that the Patriots have rebutted the Wells Report with a document that seems longer than the Pentagon Papers, and the NFL Players Association has appealed, and there is at least the suggestion that this whole thing might end up in federal court (as if federal courts just drop everything when pro sports can’t figure things out), you have the right to ask a question:
If McNally is innocent of any wrongdoing and Jastremski is innocent of any wrongdoing and Tom Brady is innocent, why were McNally and Jastremski suspended? Maybe it was just because of the text messages between the two that were supposed to be some kind of laugh riot, including the parts where we’re supposed to believe that they’re talking about weight loss when they talk about a “Deflator.”
McNally and Jastremski, pawns in this thing, pawns and collateral damage treated like nobodies, they aren’t talking. For now. Brady is talking only through his reps. The Patriots, through one of their attorneys, did plenty of talking in that rebuttal, which occasionally lapsed into unintended self-parody, especially when it tried to explain away those text messages between McNally and Jastremski as just, well, locker room hot air.
From the Patriots’ rebuttal, written by attorney Daniel Goldberg:
“Mr. Jastremski would sometimes work out and bulk up — he is a slender guy and his goal was to get to 200 pounds. Mr. McNally is a big fellow and had the opposite goal: to lose weight. ‘Deflate’ was a term they used to refer to losing weight.”
Well, there you are and here you are, with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — people now act as if Goodell took the air out of those footballs — saying he will be the one hearing Brady’s appeal of his suspension and the players’ union demanding that Goodell step aside in favor of an independent arbitrator. In so doing, of course, the people running the players’ union in pro football look and sound and act like the biggest phonies around. They also make people who are sick of this story actually start rooting for Goodell in something.
Because if DeMaurice Smith and his union didn’t want Goodell to have this kind of power in matters such as this one, then Smith and his players shouldn’t have rolled over in collective bargaining and given it to him, shouldn’t have treated that power like just another bargaining chip.
Only now they want the whole world to act outraged because Goodell says he intends to exercise rights that the union handed over to him. Really?
Maybe Goodell will cross up everybody and step aside in this mess, as unlikely as that seems right now. Maybe he will really cross up everybody and, after hearing Touchdown Tom Brady’s appeal, he will knock Brady’s suspension down from four games to two, although it seems right now as if Brady might be willing to go all the way to Judge Joe Brown before he’ll accept any sanctions, or culpability, in what has turned into one of the great spit shows in NFL history, which is saying plenty.
For the time being, though, everybody digs in, establishing rhetorical positions if not tenable legal ones (and memo to the Patriots, by the way: Your lawyer against Ted Wells doesn’t look like much of a fair fight at this point). But for the last time, the problem for the Patriots isn’t Wells’ report on Brady or McNally or Jastremski or those footballs. The problem doesn’t change:
If you read the report, the only logical conclusion is that the air didn’t come out of those footballs because of the weather or atmospheric conditions — it’s that those footballs didn’t deflate themselves. And there is no logical reason for Jim McNally and John Jastremski to somehow manipulate footballs on the day of the AFC Championship Game between the Patriots and the Colts and make them meet anything other than the exact specifications of their quarterback.
From the start Brady has offered mostly nuanced answers when asked about what happened, has never come out and said he didn’t do it, he’s outraged that anybody thinks he would do it. He’s never said that McNally or Jastremski or one of them or both of them acted alone. Maybe he will eventually say something like that under oath, if this thing ever goes that far.
But McNally and Jastremski, facing more than an indefinite suspension from a football team, will have to do the same thing. Tell their stories under oath.
You’re supposed to believe, we’re all supposed to believe, that the issue here is a punishment that is far too harsh for this particular crime. This is still about the crime, and what has seemed like a weird, clumsy cover-up from the time Bob Kravitz of WTHR.com in Indianapolis reported that there was something funny going on with footballs in Foxborough one night in January.
People still want to talk about Ray Rice originally getting only two games for what happened in that elevator and Brady getting four, as if that is some kind of defense for Brady. Only it’s not. And let’s face it, Goodell admitted, in Macy’s window, that he was dead wrong about Rice.
There is also this side argument, all the way back to January, that what does any of this matter, because the Patriots clobbered the Colts, anyway. But as my friend, the writer Harlan Coben says, saying that you would have gotten an A+ for a test on which you cheated is no defense, either.
The union has every right to appeal, and pretty soon everybody will get the chance to tell their stories under oath. At that point we’ll all get to see what’s in those text messages and emails Brady didn’t want to release because, we’re told, he just wants to protect future players if they get involved in great, big, fat, overinflated misunderstandings like this.
We will eventually hear from Brady on DeflateGate, you bet. We are already hearing plenty from his union. But the guys we really want to hear from are Jim McNally and John Jastremski. They got thrown right under the bus when the Wells Report broke. It is worth wondering what they’re thinking about under there. What the atmospheric conditions are like there.
