The transcript dump shows a league that shouldn’t be pointing fingers…
One thing was clear… crystal clear. Deflategate didn’t happen without an astounding amount of arrogance from the NFL. It wasn’t possible to have one of these without the other.
The NFL didn’t arrive in a controversy with a billion-dollar concussion invoice in its back pocket and a string of court losses for its disciplinary misbehavior and somehow expected the public to buy that its word was gold unless arrogance was its jet fuel.
But that was the reality of what made the NFL tick at that time. It took an army of messaging donkeys to help the public misremember and take the NFL at its word. Unfortunately, many of the league’s media pals were happy to turn that trick.
So, as arrogant as the NFL happened to be, its expectations were not entirely misplaced because the misleading headline-makers always seemed to catch them, like some corporate retreat trust-fall exercise.
For example, we got…
TOM BRADY DESTROYS HIS PHONE
Instead of the truth…
TOM BRADY DESTROYED A PHONE INVESTIGATORS DIDN’T WANT AND HAD NO LEGAL RIGHT TO
This was the headline warfare that the public should have been blindingly aware of by then, but that wasn’t always the case in a drive-by society.
The truth was sometimes an inconvenient number of characters to type or words to say. But in not telling the simple fact, it required a pretty cynical view of the intelligence of the people they were communicating with. In other words, they had to be just like the NFL.
With the drop of yesterday’s appeal transcript, a few new details came to light that made the NFL look all the more scummy – like trying to pass off their old concussion case lawyers as new “independent” investigators who would slide over and moonlight as attorneys for the league in the appeal. They were flesh-and-blood Decepticons.
The embarrassing document dump is just more overload on how painfully avoidable all this would’ve been if the NFL simply respected the limits of their own knowledge on the subject of air pressure.
Another personal favorite had been when Troy Vincent, NFL Executive Vice President of Game Operations, testified that he didn’t know squat about the science of air in footballs but that a part of the league’s rationale for the investigation had been to address the impact of science.
This had been one of the more astounding but unsurprising revelations throughout the ordeal. They hadn’t known how their accusation worked, but they had figured it out as they went. Holy hell, the NFL.
Yesterday didn’t change much in this case; the facts remained the same. No balls had been deflated by anything other than nature.
And the guy overseeing the process had been a buffoon who exposed the brand to problem after problem that never had to happen.
As had been maintained all along, Roger Goodell had to go. The football game had been too important to many millions of people to have had this reckless clown as the face of the sport. Was it realistic that he would be booted right then?
Probably not. But the next court massacre that the NFL was about to endure on the merits of any number of procedural loopholes the league had left slovenly wide open had been something that should have at least prompted savvy owners to privately start looking for getting something better for their top-dollar.
As said back in May, the NFL had thought the public was stupid. Yesterday, they confirmed they hadn’t changed that thinking and were willing to double down on that premise.
The embarrassing document dump had been just more overload on how painfully avoidable all this would’ve been if the NFL had respected the limits of their knowledge on air pressure.
Or maybe they respected the intelligence of the NFL fans by not trying to mislead them with false leaks and blatant lies throughout the phony investigation… too.
They did neither, and unfortunately, many untruths on this matter would live long lives because of it.
Maybe naively, it was still believed that something had to be learned from all this. When would the public learn not to trust the NFL?
The answer wasn’t known. Until they did, the NFL would continue to think they were stupid.
