Tom Brady suspended by DeflateGate mess: Roger Goodell fired next?

Because Tom Brady ultimately lied to investigators and refused to cooperate, his four game suspension seems fair and necessary. But it’s worth noting how NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has turned this into a much bigger black eye for the league than it needed to be, and seemingly on purpose. All he had to do was announce during Super Bowl week that stricter guidelines would be put in place for ball inflation in the offseason and harsh penalties would be handed out going forward. That would have quieted most of the controversy, and for better or worse, DeflateGate would have been no bigger of a parenthetical in Brady’s legacy than the Tuck Rule game.

Instead the commissioner launched a four month investigation into Brady, his latest attempt at flexing his muscle and showing who’s in charge. When Brady and team officials stopped cooperating with the investigation, that set up a situation in which the commissioner was left with no choice but to suspend his most popular player.

But if you think Roger Goodell might now be regretting having made such a big deal out of this and wishing it would go away, his actions today instead say the opposite. Instead of issuing this report two weeks ago and taking away the Patriots top 2015 draft pick, he held off until now and took their top 2016 draft pick. That means this will still a story a year from now during draft week. And for good measure he took away their fourth pick in 2017, ensuring this is still a story two years from now. He could have just taken away their first and fourth pick in 2016 and it would have been the same punishment with less negative publicity, but no, he seems to want this to go on for as long as possible.

Is the commissioner so oblivious that he doesn’t understand he’s turned this into a multi-year controversy? Is he just so power hungry that he wants everyone to still be talking two years from now about how he dropped the hammer on Tom Brady? In any case his actions suggest that it’s all about him, how we wants players to fear him, how he wants fans to be in awe of his power, and no matter how any of that affects the NFL or its reputation or popularity. Where did they even find this guy, and after nine years of making bad situations worse than they needed to be, how does he still have this job?

The bottom line is this NFL commissioner needs to go. Roger Goodell has bungled every controversy that’s happened on his watch, and turned most of them into uglier situations than they were supposed to be. When you look at how well the NBA commissioner handled the seemingly impossible Donald Sterling situation in such an adept manner that most people have already forgotten it ever happened, and you contrast that how the NFL commissioner keeps giving the league one black eye after another, it becomes clear just how badly change is needed.