Brady’s Phone
I like Apple products (everything about them except the price) but Apple fanboys are the worst. I was reading my phone in a restaurant once and my waiter, who had the Apple logo TATTOOED on his wrist, started telling me why his phone was better (I have a droid). I’ve never wanted to punch someone more in my life. Anyway Apple fanboys remind me of the worst subset of Pats fans in this whole story.
Finally, more news on this farce. I did not expect the 4 game suspension to be held up. Appeals seem to have the punishment have a 99% rate of being reduced. Hell I would have put money on it going down to at least 2 games, and part of me expected it to go away completely. But this is the hill Goodell has chosen to stand on I guess, and we took literal months to determine this. What a joke. This went from a non-story about the Colts being sore losers, to an actual story, to the funniest goddamn story of the year, to kind of excessive, to this; an exhausted farce. The fun part of this is over. The glory that was those 3-4 weeks of hilarious info dropping and angry pats fans is over, and has been replaced with something just kind of exhausting. I think most of that is the NFL taking so freaking long to hear the appeal, and then deliver the final verdict. Now with the punishment rendered and the NFLPA taking the issue to real courts, the whole thing is pretty much done. Unless the courts rule in favor of the NFL, in which case we’ll get at least one more fleeting moment of hilariously angry Pats fans. But I’m not sure I even want that anymore.
At this point Brady’s guilt no longer matters. The court case has nothing to do with Brady’s guilt. The NFL found him guilty, the case is whether or not the NFL had the authority to do so. Or something like that, I haven’t read into it as much as I should. Frankly it doesn’t matter. We’ve all made up our minds about Brady by now. Those of us who think he’s innocent will continue to deflect anything suggesting he wasn’t. Those of us who think he’s guilty will point to everything even remotely circumstantial as proof. Nothing but cold, hard evidence or testimony from Brady/co-conspirators will change anyone’s mind by now.
I still think he cheated or at least knew about it. No, none of the science on the balls was any good. All the Deflator stuff sells me and the Patriots excuses for almost everything so far feels hollow to me. I used to think his refusal to hand over his phone was damning, but I’ve softened on that, refusing to show your employer your phone is reasonable. Then we come out with the destruction thing. You know what? I can buy destroying your phone if you are a celebrity, to keep TMZ and the like out of it. I can even buy destroying your phone after just 4 months, he is rich and maybe he decided to get a new one. What bothers me is the timing. Destroying your phone is suspicious, after just 4 months more suspicious, but right after the investigation starts? Holy Shit suspicious. I think he knew about it. Sure he’s going to deny it on facebook. It’s in his best interest to. Brady has no reason to say anything other than he’s completely innocent, especially now that his part is basically over and the fight is now between the NFL and the Players Union.
Even though I’m in the Brady is guilty camp, I actually want them to win the court case. Like I said, his guilt no longer matters. This case is about how the NFL has made a complete farce of their justice process, and no matter how guilty Brady might be the NFL has absolutely screwed this up royally. When Brady says the appeal process was a farce? I believe him. When the NFLPA says Goodell overstepped his bounds, etc? I totally buy it. I have no problem whatsoever believing the NFL’s justice system is a joke, because the NFL has already proven that time after time. The entire Ray Rice debacle was because the NFL’s justice system is a joke. I’d love to see the NFL get taken down by the NFLPA here, because quite frankly, F*** Goodell and his bullshit. Besides, what happens if they win? We get gloriously angry Pats fans, but the NFL will basically be able to keep their broken farce of a justice system. If the NFL loses, sure we’ll get Pats fans acting smug like it somehow exonerates everything (it doesn’t), but they’ve been smug for years, it’s nothing new. But it might actually do something to the NFL, which would be a victory.
We won’t get a verdict here for ages. At least we’ll have actual football to distract us soon.
The NFLPA is all out of bubblegum.
Don’t get your hopes up, Dave. As far as I’m aware, the NFL has a slam-dunk defense.
The NFLPA signed the CBA in 2011 that let Goodell be judge, jury, and executioner in disciplinary matters, so even though there’s something morally wrong and objectively wrong about Goodell deciding on the punishment, overseeing the appeal, and deciding on/handing down the verdict, there’s nothing illegal about it, so nothing any court can do about it.
There’s also the issue that Brady contradicted himself in his own testimony(So you destroy your phone every eight months for privacy reasons. …Except your phone from before the one you destroyed was handed over for investigations, so you just happened to start in time to destroy the phone with evidence. …And you just happened to destroy it four months early, on what just happened to be the day of your meeting with investigators. …And then the day after the hearing ends, you contradict your whole story, saying you never destroyed your phone, but it was already broken before. Riiiiiiight.), so pretty much everything he testified to in the appeal was probably thrown out, which means the only real things supporting him in the hearing left are the Pats rebuttal to the Wells report, and Kraft’s letter testifying to Tommy’s character. Not exactly a strong case. And that being the case, it’s completely reasonable and completely rational for them to uphold the sentence; if you called someone to the stand to defend themselves in a legal court, and they proceeded to give testimony that implicated them of both perjury and spoliation of evidence, you’d ring them up on the charges in-question.
So long as he’s within the confines of the CBA – which, as far as I can tell, he is – Rodge can’t be touched legally for the ruling. And given Brady’s laughably bad testimony – even Hernandez did a better job of avoiding implicating himself. Hernandez never contradicted himself, he only let one detail he shouldn’t have slip – it’s completely justifiable that the suspension was upheld.
The only real reason that this lawsuit is being filed is so Tahmmy can get an injunction so his punishment can be pushed off until either A. the Pats are out of contention – unlikely – or B. their season ends. The NFLPA isn’t winning this, Brady isn’t winning this, and even if they did, it wouldn’t change anything. Goodell would still be as draconian as ever, and any reforms would only be marginal, because owners like this kind of power, like Goodell as the man to run it, and even if this makes Kraft go full-on Davis, it’s 1 vs. 31(If you don’t think every other owner was toasting the ruling, you’re fooling yourself. The guys signing Goodell’s checks and who he answers to are happy with their kangaroo court, because they’re riding in the pouch.), it won’t matter. The only thing an all-but-impossible loss in the court will do to the NFL is give it a black eye that’s nowhere near as bad as anything else it’s endured recently.
This isn’t going to change the NFL. Just sit back and enjoy the Pats fan rage with me.
Excellent clarificatoring, sir. I am curious about the detail that Hernandez let slip – I never heard that detail.
That he was, indeed, at the scene of the crime, which had been previously unproven.
Damn I didn’t realize it was that bleak for Brady. I knew it was partially about holding off his suspension but damn. Brady is a dick.
Well, I guess it’s time to enjoy Pats tears *grabs popcorn*
Waaahhhh!!
(teehee)
It’s not as cut and dry as “The Clarificator” says. Here’s the opinon of an actual lawyer not affiliated with the Pats in any way: http://www.stradleylaw.com/deflategate-legal-questions/
I am not a labor lawyer.
But from my understanding from reading lots of stuff is that there are several ways Brady can attack the ruling:
– He can show Goodell was biased
– The “more probably than not” standard is not mentioned in the CBA. Since it wasn’t collectively bargained, it is unfair for him to be judged on it.
– There’s nothing in the CBA requiring him to turn over personal property. So he can’t be punished for it.
– The punishment is so far in excess of what previous penalties have been given for similar offenses that the right to give this penalty must be collectively bargained. This is why Greg Hardy’s penalty was reduced.
I find it interesting that the NFL preemptively filed suit to try to get heard in what is perceived to be a more favorite jurisdiction. One might think they are not too confident about the punishment being upheld.
*More Probable Than Not is a legal term, and is a solid one. We’re not dealing with jail time; we’re not looking at Beyond a Shadow of a Reasonable Doubt. That phrasing is absolutely the correct phrasing and burden of proof the NFL should be seeking.
*The CBA and NFL bylaws and the contract that Brady signed to play with the Patriots requires compliance with NFL investigations. If the NFL had no right to investigate this matter, you might have a point, but the NFL not only has a right but an obligation to investigate cheating. Brady absolutely had an obligation to hand over his phone. The CBA doesn’t need to define “cooperate” so minutely that reasonable requests– such as the handing over of evidence– must be spelled out; that’s common sense enough that even legalese wouldn’t touch that argument without extraordinary desperation and a guarantee of being paid regardless of outcome.
*Brady’s lawyers can tell the NFL anything they want; if he has destroyed evidence, the *COURT* (which has much stricter standards than any business’ internal affairs), has an obligation to view the missing evidence as damning (just how damning is left to the judge/jury) if it is at all reasonable to assume it could, in any way, have been so. His lawyers don’t get to decide what the NFL asks for, and the NFL’s request is far from unreasonable, especially given the safeguards provided that would have ensured Brady’s privacy remained intact.
I like the Patriots– I’m not a fan, but so long as the Patriots winning a game doesn’t conflict with my team’s chances, I root for them. I like Brady. I despise Goodell. But the only way the NFLPA wins this is with an extraordinarily biased judge who will rule against the NFL on everything on principle. The good news for the NFLPA is that there is one; the bad news is that the NFL filed its case first, and jurisdiction seems unlikely to go through Minnesota but instead through Manhattan.
*Brady isn’t being punished for exercising his rights. He isn’t in legal trouble, and his bosses have a reasonable expectation that his personal property contained evidence that he was violating the bylaws of the company he works for. He signed a contract promising full cooperation. His union signed a CBA promising full cooperation. He didn’t fully cooperate. The NFL doesn’t have anything like the burden of proof required for criminal investigation, yet this would ABSOLUTELY fall under reasonable search-and-seizure. No one’s rights are being violated: the NFL had a reasonable expectation by even the loosest legal definitions to think that phone contained evidence, they had every reasonable right to ask for it, and denying that is really kind of weird.
*The NFLPA doesn’t really have a strong case against Goodell, either– they agreed to the terms, and it is not unlike other agreements that exist where intra-company violations occur. It’s not the standard, but it’s definitely not illegal– especially since the NFLPA (and this bears repeating), specifically agreed to that proviso in their last negotiations.
Goodell is a draconian thug who is arbitrary and quite possibly psychopathic in the truest sense of the term, and utterly unable to distinguish right from wrong. He is the worst commissioner the NFL has ever had, and considering some of the guys that were around in the 20s and 30s, that actually saying something pretty significant. He is bad for the sport, he is bad for sports generally, he is bad for America’s business model. I wish the owners would wise up, realize that Goodell is not selling their product– their product is selling their product– and that he is damaging their product every single day. Get the job to Condi– that would be an enormous PR coup.
In the meantime, though, his punishment is within the bounds of the CBA. He has not violated (in this instance) one iota of his rights and responsibilities as agreed upon in the CBA. Overruling this, legally, would be an absolutely terrifying precedent. It would establish that contracts between unions and their employers, even when legal (and at least these clauses are), are meaningless. I don’t care if you’re pro-business, pro-union, in between, or neither, that should *TERRIFY* you. So long as laws are not being violated, the government’s obligation regarding contracts is not to determine their fairness, but if they are being followed. That is ALL that their job is, and ever should be. Anything beyond that removes the power of two people or organizations to compromise based on their own standards of necessity and goodness, and places it in the hands of judges, who may not even be elected. Let that sink in for a moment.
I don’t care if you think Brady is as innocent as a baby and as clean as the driven snow: if he wins this in court, the precedent to simply ignore contracts would undermine one of the single greatest purposes of the government. We can’t even say the NFLPA screwed up in this clause without knowing what they got in return: and that is the key point. That is what makes it critically important something Dave said: it doesn’t matter if Brady is guilty or not. It really does not. All that matters is that A) the NFL violated no laws (it did not), and B) the NFL did not violate the CBA (it did not), and C) that Brady did violate the CBA (a reasonable case can be made that he did– whether you agree with that case is irrelevant).
Right now, it is my firm belief that the NFLPA is posturing, because it basically has to on something as high-profileon this, but that they know they have no leg to stand on. They need to at least appear to defend Brady or they lose all kinds of face, but they know as well as anyone that they have no real case. I think they would have better served Brady in telling him “Sorry, man. We can’t help you.” But most people can’t understand how that would actually be helping him, and unions don’t often work that way, even when it actually is in the member’s best interest.
(And given that the Minni judge has ordered the lawsuit be moved to NYC, there should really be nothing to worry about).
– How do you prove that? Rodge says he’s unbiased, Brady says he’s biased. Rodge points at the CBA letting him have that kind of jurisdiction, at the Wells report for his justification for the initial punishment, and Brady’s broken testimony as his justification for maintaining it. The only thing Goodell is biased to is what he thinks will win PR points, show me where you can prove he’s biased?
– It’s not mentioned in the CBA, but it’s a very common legal standard. It’s used in pretty much every civil lawsuit, including this one. “Innocent unless proven guilty”, to the best of my knowledge, is never mentioned in the CBA, which means that the exact standard of proof once again falls to the league’s discretion.
– Problem with that is that it’s not about his refusal to turn over his personal property as much as it’s about his refusal to turn over specific property. Brady turned over an old phone that he used before the one that was destroyed, and offered his new phone, but never showed the one with potential evidence on it. If someone were taken to court for committing fraud over the course of 2013, and let you look at their financial records from 2012 and 2014, but refused to let you see their records from 2013 because they just happened to burn them the day before the meeting, I’d be pretty suspicious of that. There’s also the issue that Brady contradicted himself by claiming to destroy his phone every eight months on a regular basis for privacy, even though his old phones still existed and were used in the investigation, so his “I do it for privacy and it just happened to coincidentally be that day” explanation merits serious suspicion.
– As far as I’m aware, this is the first time that an active player has been caught tampering equipment in a case where they obstructed the NFL’s investigation, lied to the NFL, etc., etc.. People like to raise the Chargers Stickum case, but the problem with that is that 1. The folks stopping the NFL from investigating the towels were Chargers equipment staff, not players. 2. They didn’t know who did and didn’t use it. Collective punishment is rarely justifiable, so without knowing who did and didn’t use it, it’d be hard for the NFL to discipline individual players. We know that Brady was in all likelihood at the center of this whole thing. Punishing one man is very different from punishing every player on a team for something that may have just been one or two. 3. It’s the Patriots. “The Patriots shouldn’t be punished more just because they’re successful!” Bullshit. The Patriots are repeat offenders, and just like you’d give someone who stole a car in 2007 a harsher penalty if they stole another car in 2014, the Patriots have broken rules, been caught, and been punished before. They also did this in much more important games. Just like you’d punish someone who stole $20,000 much differently than someone who stole $20, you punish someone who cheats to get to 7-9 – the record of the ’12 Chargers – much differently than someone who cheats to win a Superbowl. You can bet Noisegate would’ve been far more than $350k and a fifth-rounder if, instead of the Falcons who went 7-9 at home over the course of it, it was the Seahawks, whose 17-2 homefield advantage – including playoffs – was such a huge factor in two Superbowl trips and one win.
Yes, this exactly. The NFL is likely to win this, especially since it got officially moved to New York. The reason Goodell took so long in his ruling with the appeal wasn’t because he’s incompetent (which he is but not in this case) it’s because the NFL’s lawyers were making sure they could IMMEDIATELY file to have this heard in New York (home field advantage for them) and make sure they would win whatever challenge Brady throws at them.
Goodell knew this so he waited to make his appeal judgement until the lawyers told him to. Brady is toast and while he’ll probably start the season, it’s entirely possible that the judgement that the NFL wins will come down during playoff time or such and the Pats will be without Brady during the most important part of the season. If I were Brady, I’d own up to it or at least say “I didn’t do anything wrong but I’m going to take my medicine.” Hell, if he hadn’t immediately threatened to take it to court, I bet Goodell lowers the suspension to 2 games or maybe even just a fine. The fact that he threatened that – and that the NFL is likely to win – why would Goodell change anything? All the power is in the NFL hands for this and Brady is screwed.
As for Goodell being power mad: as The Clairificator said, he legally has the right to do that. The NFLPA signed off on it so they now have to live with it, as mad as it may make them.
I imagine the next time the CBA comes up for renewal, that will be something the NFLPA kicks and screams about. Until then though, they are stuck with Goodell.
Goodell is acting well outside the confines of the CBA.
He very much isn’t, and that’s why Brady won’t win no matter how much we all want Goodell to lose on principle.
Tom Brady has done the impossible: being such a whiny little b*tch that he makes Rodger Goddell likable.
I hear Goddell offered 1-2 games TOTAL if Brady would admit some guilt and put the whole thing behind them for the good of everybody. But little Timmy has to stomp his feet like the five year old who swears up and done that he didn’t knock over that lamp at his feet, the baseball embedded in it and the glove on his hand nonewithstanding.
Getting a slight PSI change doesn’t hurt his legacy. This sh*t does.
that deal never happened, there was no offer from the nfl to reduce the suspension if he admitted guilt.
I keep seeing “none of the Wells report science held up” but literally all reports and studies that weren’t paid for by the pats says it does, which of course their study is going to dispute, because if you pay an expert he better say what you want him to. Seriously, why has this narrative stuck when it makes literally no sense to think the one study the pats paid for is valid, but the Wells report and all the other experiments done by 3rd parties that aren’t involved just wrong?
Googling “Wells Report Science Wrong” is pretty funny, actually. It’s basically reports from all the Boston news outlets, with a few others sprinkled in.
It really makes me wonder how much the geographic relation of Bristol to Foxboro has to do with how much the story turned pats friendly, well, until the cell phone thing came out at least.
To make it more interesting, Brady’s contention that he regularly destroys his old phones is sort of.. well, not true.
http://www.businessinsider.com/tom-brady-phone-excuse-2015-7
Just another swing of the shovel as he digs himself deeper?
If the courts find in favor of the league, we get to see Jimmy G (I always want to call him “Kenny G”, haha) tear shit up. And Belichick isn’t suspended, so whoever is under center will be quite solid. He did it with Matt Cassel, he can make ANY quarterback look like a hall of famer. Even Tom Brady.
Yeah, I went there…
I love this narrative. Bellichick has a losing record and his offences average over 7 ppg without Brady. But let’s ignore that and put all Brady has done on Bellichick.
You can’t really count his Cleveland record in that – it was a whole different team that he had to rebuild from the ground up (and was succeeding, until Modell announced the move in the middle of the season, which blew everything up).
If you look at 2008, which is the year Cassell played, the Patriots were 11-5 scored 410 points, which was 2nd in the AFC. And that was only 17 fewer points than they scored when Brady came back the next year.
Look at his record with Bledsoe, with the same team that went to the Super Bowl with Brady the next year. Look at what Cassel did with the team that went undefeated and broke records the previous season and the following year scored more points with Brady being limited the first quarter of the season when he was coming off an ACL tear.
I’m not saying Brady made Bellichick but for fuck’s sake, stop cheapening the man’s accomplishments as if it was all his coach’s doing. Brady IS a HOF QB, Bellichick or no Bellichick.
The part about this whole thing that I hate is how no one is capable of being logical or level headed about this entire thing. Most people are either completely blindly in love with Brady that he can do no wrong, or hate him so much that any possibility of him doing something wrong means he’s automatically guilty.
People can’t seem to get past their emotions on this one. The truest part of Daves comments us the part where he says that unless concrete evidence comes out, we’ll never know what happened.
The standard of proof being used here is so low that basically all the NFL can do is point a finger at Brady and then punish him.
Should have been called Apples and Appeals, just saying.
this is just an equipment violation, i dont get the whole blown out of proportion mess it has become.
should have been a fine and nothing else, but the media got a hold of the story and roger panicked.
He’s not getting punished for the violation, he’s getting punished for the cover-up.
Yeah it probably would have been small if the Pats just took the punch and moved on but they hunkered down and the NFL decided to pounce on them for it
That’s the problem here is that Brady is being punished for exercising his rights.
Immediately admitting wrong doing is what Michael Vick did. Even if dogfighting is a much more serious crime than deflating a ball, but still.
Was just clued in on this site: http://www.yourteamcheats.com
Read through any one of the rules violations and you start to realize how stupid this entire thing is. The NFL is built on cheating.
This site is built and maintained by a Pat’s fan, is ridiculously biased, and only good for a laugh. There’s no scientific method to ascribing valuation on the severity of cheating the way he does, opinion is treated as fact to an extent that would shame even a politician. It’s a farce.
That site says the 72 dolphins season should have an astrisk next to it for the way Miami got Shula from the colts.
There’s nothing in the CBA that compels players to turn over their private property in an investigation. There’s nothing in the CBA that says failure to turn over your personal property to the league constitutes failure to cooperate.
Brady’s lawyers told the league there was no way they were ever getting his phone – before it broke or was destroyed or whatever.
So the whole phone thing is pure PR bullshit from the league.
I feel like this whole “he didn’t pony up his phone” angle is a power play by the league to make it acceptable to violate players’ privacy in the name of discipline. They know they have no power to compel players to divulge their personal communications in the current CBA. But they also know that this hamstrings their ability to find out exactly what their players get up to in their off hours and dispense discipline based on that. So their calculus is that if they go after the most high-profile guy in the league, even on a trumped-up charge, and make an example of him, they can manufacture a precedent and scare the other 1700+ players into compliance.
Brady’s guilt or innocence no longer matters. In fact, I’m willing to bet it never mattered. This whole thing is an attempt to compensate for the bad PR they got for mishandling Ray Rice and other serious matters.
I can smell the tinfoil.
The issue isn’t that Brady refused to give his phone. Nobody cares that he refused to give up his phone as far as the appeal is concerned. The original punishment sure, but that wasn’t the issue in the appeal. The issue is that Brady said the reason he didn’t give his phone was that he destroyed it, and that he destroys his phone every eight months for privacy, but the phone he destroyed was only four months old, and the phone he used before it was submitted, so he destroyed it at a date inconsistent with his explanation. That date just happens to be the day he met with investigators, and the phone he started destroying phones with just happens to be the one with the evidence they wanted on it.
The suspension wasn’t upheld because Brady refused to give his phone. The suspension was upheld because the reason that Brady said he didn’t give it to the league made zero sense and was at odds with reality. He lied in his testimony, and when you perjure yourself, everything you say is thrown out, because if you lied here, how do we know you didn’t lie elsewhere? Without Brady’s testimony, all that there was supporting him was more or less the Pats rebuttal to the Wells report, and Kraft’s “Tom’s a good guy” letter. If this is the league sending any message, it’s that they’ll fuck you if you lie to them, not that you have to give the NFL your phone. Ray Rice was honest in his hearing with Goodell, and it worked out well for him – at the time anyway – Brady lied, and he got punished for it.
It’s a labor versus management battle now.
Go Labor!
Labor winning these battles (letting workers cheat, get overpaid, and be lazy) is the reason that were losing all of our (I’ll assume you’re from north America) jobs to other countries.
The reason all of our jobs are going overseas is because the entire damn system is designed for as few people as possible to have all of the damned wealth. Yeah, people wanting protection from businesses that see them as nothing more then expendable numbers to be exploited is just awful. How dare people want comfortable lives!
I am far from anti-labor, but this is a labor vs. management battle the union wants to lose. They want to fight (that’s what unions are for, after all), but winning this would set a horrible precedence on a union’s ability to meaningfully negotiate with management, and if that happens, the question no long becomes what two free, sober, and (at least legally) competent persons or organizations agree to within the confines of the law, but how an unelected individual feels about a particular part of that agreement. I know that a lot of pro-unionists want to win every fight, but ask yourself this: who has more political clout– big businesses, or unions? If you answered unions, you’re delusional. You do NOT want this precedent to get set or to gain more traction, especially on a case as high profile as this has become.
This whole case now pretty much revolves around Brady not giving up his phone.
Why would the union want to lose this, and set a precedent that any time a player doesn’t offer up whatever personal property or records that the league at their whim decides they need, the player gets a four game suspension?
Maybe next time they want financial records, or gps records, or maybe the girlfriend/wife’s phone. Why would the union want to open themselves up to this?
The last player punished for not cooperating got a $50K fine. To jump from $50K to $2mil and a 4 game suspension?
That is part of it, though the NFL certainly has the right to ask for it and fire you if you don’t provide it– your current employer could do the same, for any or no reason whatsoever, at least in most states. Of course, if you’re in a union or if you have tenure you receive some protection. But, if that phone was used to discuss one’s violation of the company’s bylaws, they absolutely have the right to request the phone (or even emails, laptop, whatever), in question to verify it. They need to have a decent case– but the NFL already had that case with the texts from the flunkies deflating. They cannot bring criminal prosecution to you if you fail to provide the phone in question (unless it involves you violating more than just the bylaws of the country, but actually violating municipal, county, state, federal, or international laws), but they are certainly in their rights to provide disciplinary action in accordance with their bylaws.
And they would have absolute right to access GPS records, or financial records for the same types of information. They would NOT have a right to access a girlfriend or a wife’s phone, unless she is also an employee of the same company, though they could very definitely receive subpoenas for them if it were a legal issue, and she is a suspected participant or accomplice.
In this case, though, the broader question is whether the NFL is allowed to act in accordance with the CBA. Whether that is asking for phones (they are entitled, per the CBA, to full cooperation from players in the NFL’s investigations of this nature), or Goodell’s fitness to serve as final arbiter of the case, or the nature of Brady’s fines. But– and I hate defending Goodell on anything– the NFL is absolutely and 100% following the CBA on this one. Like, there’s nothing they are doing that the NFLPA hasn’t agreed to.
If this goes to a legal battle, and the NFLPA wins, the validity of all contracts– ALL contracts– becomes more tenuous, and say what you will, but if contracts between two sober, willing, competent parties are not binding, then all kinds of fall out follows. This wasn’t people without adequate representation– the head of the NFLPA is a lawyer; Goodell is a lawyer. Both have TEAMS of lawyers. These are exceptionally competent people when it comes to these negotiations. IF this CBA gets overturned– in part or in whole– then you’re going to be looking at unions all over getting jerked around, because no employer will be able to trust a union contract. It would establish a massive precedence that would destroy the only thing that makes unions work: the government will enforce their contracts. If the union agrees to a bad contract, that’s on the union– and if you can prove that a union boss was bribed or otherwise unfit to act as negotiator on behalf as the union, that’s one thing. But that’s not what’s going on here, and everyone knows it.
If a private company forced you to turn over your cell phone for something like this, where there is no obligation laid out in the contract and then fired you for saying no, you could absolutely sue the ever loving snot out of them. Right to work does not get you out of wrongful termination. If you can link that you were fired for ignoring an illegal order, you will win.
I wonder what Brady would think when he realizes the EDGY $900 CUTTING EDGE INNOVATING SPECTACULAR 2 COOL IPHONE 9 WAS ANNOUNCED
Thank god camp has started:
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/let-s-watch-tom-brady-s-one-handed-catch-from-julian-edelman-163408446.html
I’m a Pats fan. I’m not angry at anything. I just want this whole thing to be over so I can stop hearing about it. It’s getting exhausting now and I honestly don’t care whether Brady is guilty or not. The justice systems in the NFL is an absolute joke and this just proves that Goodell learned nothing from Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson last year. I don’t care what the outcome is, just give me some football-with or without Brady.
This whole episode is really annoying.
This could have been solved by: (1) Having Godell call Kraft and tell him: “We know you did it. It’s a stupid rule, but you broke it. Tell Brady that I will fine him 500,000 dollars, and make sure that he just apoligizes, instead of acting up like a dick, so we can put this to rest quickly”. (2) Owning up to some of the responsibility for the whole affair, by saying that the NFL would revise its procedures (since it’s stupid to set rules that won’t be supervised ever).
But everybody decided to escalate it, in increasingly irrational ways, to the point in which some people with no knolewdge of either situation, can sactimoniously express that for the NFL, deflating balls + destroying self’s phone = domestic violence.
At this point you have to make a number of counterituitive assumptions to consider Brady innocent. Nevertheless, I want him to go to court for two reasons: (1) in spite of what the CBA says, I hope that at some point the NFL decides that it would be easier for everyone involved (not to mention fairer), to select arbitrators with the consent of both parties, and (2) I would like to see some precedentent stating that your employer can’t punish you for not handling your personal phone.
I’m a firm beliver on privacy rights, so I think that your personal phone is your personal phone, but the law can be complicated.
In other news, the best pocket (sized) passer in the league just got paid. Good for Wilson; he’s a top 5 QB, and I’m glad he’s getting paid like one.
I’m glad it stands. It should have been more. Brady lied, broke rules, covered it up and tried to stall the investigation. He deserves what he got at a minimum.
So now that a Federal judge is blowing more holes into the NFL’s case then a hillbilly with an automatic shotgun are all you guys on here still so sure that the case is a “slam dunk” for the NFL?