Hurley: Roger Goodell Needs To Accept Defeat, Drop DeflateGate Appeal Before Ruining Another Super Bowl
BOSTON (CBS) -- Earth to Roger Goodell: You lost. It's time to accept this fact.
The NFL commissioner who is not a lawyer and did not study law clearly still believes he knows more than a federal judge in New York, as Goodell's mission to bring down Tom Brady is now guaranteed to extend into 2016.
News came down Tuesday afternoon that the U.S. Court of Appeals granted the NFL's request for an expedited hearing. That means arguments could be heard, at the earliest, on Feb. 1, and a ruling could come the following week.
The Super Bowl -- you know, the 50th Super Bowl, the one which the league is making a huge deal about, the one that has led to all NFL logos being turned gold and the 50s on every field be painted gold as well -- will be played on Feb. 7.
That means that Goodell is willing and apparently ready to torpedo the league's premier event for the second year in a row because he wants to prove how big and bad he is.
The man must be stopped.
He already sabotaged the two-week buildup to the Super Bowl this past February, and he's prepared to do it again for a historic event in league history.
As a reminder, this is not about the air pressure in footballs. It never was about air pressure in footballs. If it had been about air pressure in footballs, it could have been dealt with before the game ever started. But let's not go down that road -- it's been explored extensively over the past eight months.
Instead, it's time to focus squarely on Goodell. How many times does he need to be told by authority figures that he runs his league with no order or fairness? We've seen federal judges -- active and retired -- tell him this. We've seen his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue (who happened to be a lawyer), tell him this.
Yet he still thinks he's right. He waited all of 20 minutes after hearing Judge Richard Berman's ruling before filing an appeal and saying he disagreed with the judge's decision. And that came after the NFL and its lawyers spent a month in Berman's court telling the judge that he had no authority.
And losing did not deter Goodell from having one of his stooges tell Craig Carton that Brady is "guaranteed" to serve a four-game suspension this season even though that is literally impossible. Literally, impossible.
(Carton oddly took a victory lap on Twitter on Tuesday after the news came out, and it's quite clear that Carton just doesn't understand much about the whole situation. It's pretty much par for the course with how the NFL has operated with regard to DeflateGate since the very start. Chris Mortensen has admitted to not even knowing the rules on the PSI of footballs before he reported about the rules on the PSI of footballs. Bob Kravitz, who originally broke the news of the investigation into the footballs, thought that Andrew Luck's footballs would have been affected that night in Foxboro. Carton now believes Brady will "no doubt" serve a four-game suspension this season, even after he heard that arguments will be heard Feb. 1 at the earliest. Basically, it's been a lot easier than it should be for the NFL to disseminate misinformation.)
The fact of the matter is this: Judge Berman ruled definitively and decisively against Goodell. He did so based on tremendous precedent.
Only somebody as obtuse and delusional as Goodell could have read the judge's ruling and come away saying, "No, this is not right."
And accordingly, the NFL maintains that Berman did not have the power to rule on what he ruled -- even though it was the NFL that brought the case to Berman's court in the first place.
It was yet another embarrassing blemish on Goodell's tenure as commissioner, one that is sure to not last very long. If he had any shred of decency or self-awareness he would know that his best move now would be to drop the appeal. He talks about integrity, and protecting the shield, and doing what's best for the game, yet his continued efforts to put his own ego ahead of the league's interests resonate much louder than empty words.
He is the ultimate hypocrite. He punished Brady because he believed that the quarterback cheated and lied and then didn't show proper respect to authority. Yet the more that's been revealed in the DeflateGate saga, we've just seen how much Goodell and his cronies have lied and cheated throughout the entire process. That's a list that includes VP of officiating Dean Blandino, executive VP of football ops Troy Vincent, "independent" investigator Ted Wells, executive VP/general counsel Jeff Pash, and Goodell himself, to name a few.
And given the comments made by NFL lawyer Daniel Nash toward Judge Berman, the league and Goodell could not have been more disrespectful to that particular authority figure.
Goodell has committed the same acts for which he hopes to hang Brady, and in some cases his offenses have gone far beyond whatever Brady might have done or known, and yet the commissioner faces no discipline. He is, in his own mind, above the law that he has created.
It's madness, and if the NFL owners want the world to focus on the actual football game that will be played in February, they'd be wise to advise their commissioner that it's time to end this pathetic fight. No more judges' time needs to be wasted. No more millions of dollars need to be wasted. It's time to put an end to DeflateGate.
You lost this one, Roger. And you lost it after clouding Super Bowl week -- a period that should be the NFL's brightest moment -- with an avalanche of nonsense that diverted attention from the product on the field. You tried your best, and hey, you got Robert Kraft to accept historic penalties. But you took the case to court and you lost.
Don't drag us all down with you again.
Read more from Michael Hurley by clicking here. You can email him or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.
