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In the days and weeks to come, the Deflategate War is going to rage on. Roger Goodell launched a major offensive Tuesday by upholding Tom Brady‘s draconian suspension. Brady, his agent Don Yee and the Patriots have launched a three-pronged counteroffensive and vowed to continue the attack.

And if you’re a Brady loyalist who’s defended the wall from the beginning of this campaign, you’re going to have to arm yourself. The enemies of all that is good will continue to press the attack. And you’ll need ammo. So with that, I present to you in handy list form the five core counterarguments to Goodell’s decision. Memorize them. You’ll need them as the battle rages on.

1. The appeal process was a rigged game all along.

Read through Roger Goodell’s decision and I defy you to find even one instance where he gave credit to Brady’s arguments or deviated even slightly from either Ted Wells’ report or Troy Vincent’s punishment. Scratch that. Let me save you the trouble. There isn’t one. The entire document is nothing but a Spark Notes version of the Wells report. All 243 pages boiled down to 20.

Even with respect to Wells’ most ridiculous conclusions, like the claim that Walt Anderson misremembered which gauge he used to measure the footballs before the AFC title game, Goodell found Wells’ logic “unassailable” (see footnote 1). For all the attention he paid to Brady’s appeal, he could have saved everybody in that room 10 hours of their lives and taken them to a Dave & Busters instead because he completely rubber stamped everything that came from the league prior. Or better yet, he could have saved himself a lot of time working on this damn report and just wrote, “You’re right, Ted!”

As the saying goes, when two people agree on everything, only one of them is doing the thinking.


2. Goodell completely ignored the science.

As I’ve said from the day the Wells Report came out, the science firm Ted Wells went all the way across the country to find is a notorious Junk Science R Us hired gun who will tell their clients anything they want to hear, from smoking won’t kill you to rainforests are the perfect dumping grounds for toxic waste. Virtually no one supports their findings on Deflategate except Wells. And now, to the shock of none of us, Goodell.

Brady’s team brought in Dean Snyder, an expert from Yale, to rip Exponent’s laughably pseudo-science apart. They might as well have brought in Rob Schneider for all the weight Goodell gave his testimony. As a side note, I’m going to suggest that the next time a Patriots player is fighting for his reputation in the face of garbage science, his lawyers bring in an expert who wears a lab coat and glasses and talks with a German accent. Maybe then the commissioner will actually listen to him.

3. The destroyed phone is a red herring.

As Brady said in his Facebook post Wednesday, he wasn’t going to hand over his phone. He was under no obligation to hand over his phone. His phone broke, so he replaced it. The fact that he had an assistant destroy it is no more relevant than if he put it in a sock drawer, donated it to the troops, chucked it into his coy pond or sleeps with it under his pillow every night. The football world will forever act like he pulled an Aaron Hernandez with it. But the phone is his to do with what he pleases. And if it was still intact, neither Wells nor Goodell would have a single byte more evidence than they do without it. Which leads me to …

4. Brady did cooperate.

Wells’ investigators and Goodell have all the information they requested. Or need. Goodell himself says in footnote 11 that he was given a spreadsheet with all 10,000 texts Brady sent over the four months in question (that is about 85 per day, by the way. Is he a quarterback or a 15-year-old girl?), and the contact info for everyone he had texted with. Goodell was told his staff was free to reach out to anyone on the list to find out what Brady had texted to them, but he says that “is simply not practical.”

So after an investigation that took over 100 days and has cost more than $10 million, an appeal process that took over a month, and a punishment to one of the greats ever to play the game that is unprecedented in NFL history, Goodell couldn’t be bothered to follow up and find out what exactly Brady said in those messages he’s being suspended for. Got it.

Also, we need to keep in mind that the NFL has all the texts between Brady, Jim McNally and John Jastremski. But somewhere in those other 10,000 messages must be the smoking gun. Not that anyone should take the time to look for it. Let’s just assume it is and continue to watch the commissioner not earn his $44 million.

5. The punishment still doesn’t fit the alleged crime.

Even if every conclusion Goodell reached is true — which it is not, but just play the game with me — there is no justification for a four-game suspension. He compares altering the footballs to PED use, while ignoring the fact that when footballs have been tampered with before, it was met with little more than a “Hey, you kids, knock that off” from officials. The Carolina Panthers put balls in front of the sideline heaters in Minnesota last year and were simply told to stop it. The San Diego Chargers put stickum-covered towels on their game balls, then hid the towels, and they were fined $10,000. Then that fine was dropped.

And if Goodell wants to hang his noose on the gallows of “non-cooperation,” he’s not only ignoring the fact that he was handed all the information he needed, when Brett Favre refused to hand over his phone after sending pictures of his Li’l Gunslinger to a female Jets employee, he got a small fine. The Ravens pretended the Ray Rice “Elevator of Domestic Abuse” video didn’t exist and got nothing. Tom Brady destroys his phone and gets four games, Ray Lewis destroyed a white suit splattered with blood at a crime scene, and he gets zero games, a statue and a plum job at ESPN.

Memorize them. Use them. And by all means, stay with me on that wall.



@JerryThornton1