and here was Tom Brady's offer to the NFL Per USA Today:
There was a time, right as he was graduating from Michigan, that Tom Brady didn’t know what he was going to do with himself. Getting drafted wasn’t guaranteed and becoming one of the greatest, and now most notorious, quarterbacks in league history seemed to be a pipe dream, at best. In fact, Brady even came up with a resume just in case the whole football thing didn’t work out.
Well, good thing he never had to use that resume in the real world because Brady doesn’t exactly seem cut out for business life, as he and the art of negotiating apparently go together like oil and that water around the Rio Olympic venues. According to George Atallah, the NFLPA’s longly worded Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs, Brady was counter-offering the NFL’s minimized suspension deal with, get this, no games and a fine that was probably less than the $1.1 million he’ll lose from the four games he’s scheduled to miss
Good work, guys. And for that, what, Don Yee is getting $1,100 per billable hour? That’s like going into a car dealership and the salesman says, “I think we can get you in this car at $24,500, but that’s as low as my manager will let me go.” And you pause for a few seconds and finally say, “how about you pay me $500 to take it off your hands and give me some coupons to Chili’s for the trouble.” Had Brady and his lawyers been at the Reykjavik Conference, they’d have been all, eh, just give it all to the Soviets. If they were representing you at a shoplifting trial, you’d be in Supermax next to the Unabomber.
This was the entire problem with Brady’s misguided sense of Deflategate and the first lesson of Negotiation 101: You can only operate from a place of power if you have the leverage to do so. What Brady’s team never realized is that the NFL is teflon right now, even if no one likes Roger Goodell. Through the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson debacles of 2014, people kept watching football in record numbers. While Brady might have thought the NFL was never going to go through with suspending him, the Golden Boy, he failed to understand that the NFL is far bigger than Tom Brady.
I mean, Roger Goodell can’t do anything right in the eyes of the press and public but none of that affects people’s interest in football every Sunday. He could have been caught hunting with that lion dentist and it wouldn’t have had any impact on the ratings for the Thursday Night Opener, one that will be a huge game for the league due to Brady’s lack of involvement. And then when he comes back, on a Sunday night against Indianapolis, the very team Deflategate started against, it’s another win for the league.
Tom Brady didn’t get that. The league always wins, even when it loses. And that’s why you don’t go in with an insane offer of no games and a fine. Start in the very middle at least. Negotiate. Don’t expect your image to get you out of it, because when it comes down to Roger Goodell and anyone else, Goodell always comes out on top.