Tom Brady’s ends DeflateGate appeal process, will serve suspension

It took nearly two years -- 544 days to be exact -- but the Deflategate saga finally came to an end on Friday, July 15, 2016. In January 2015 it was reported that the NFL was investigating the possibility that the New England Patriots played the AFC Championship against the Indianapolis Colts with partially deflated footballs. Six months later, deflated footballs, a debate over cheating and the Patriots are back in the Super Bowl, their seventh with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.

In May 2015, the league handed down a four-game suspension to quarterback Tom Brady for his role in the incident and docked the Patriots a first-round draft pick. The Patriots accepted their punishment but Brady did not, forcing NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to uphold the suspension on appeal.

Tom Brady wasn’t allowed to talk to his teammates or step foot inside the New England Patriots’ facility while he served his four-game DeflateGate suspension last month. Suffice to say, his long awaited return against the Cleveland Browns Sunday may have been the most anticipated moment of the season to date.

Brady, per usual, strutted into the stadium with a dapper suit. Defensive end Jabaal Sheard, meanwhile, decided to wear Brady’s jersey.

Most expected Brady to ask the United States Supreme Court to grant him a stay on his four-game suspension after the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which reinstated Brady’s suspension this spring and subsequently refused to rehear the case, recently rejected his request.

“It has been a challenging 18 months and I have made the difficult decision to no longer proceed with the legal process,” Brady wrote in a Facebook post. “I’m going to work hard to be the best player I can be for the New England Patriots and I look forward to having the opportunity to return to the field this fall.”

On Wednesday, the NFL Player’s Association, which filed the appeal on Brady’s behalf, called the league’s disciplinary protocol a “broken system” and expressed disappointment in the court’s decision.

“The NFL Players Association is a labor Union that protects the rights of all of its members and pursues any violations of those rights by any means necessary,” a statement read. “We are disappointed with the decision denying a rehearing, as there were clear violations of our collective bargaining agreement by the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Goodell, 57, spoke with reporters at the Jim Kelly Celebrity Classic golf tournament in Buffalo on Monday, and unsurprisingly revealed that no settlement between the NFL and Brady is on the way. Well over a year into the battle between Brady and the league, Goodell was asked on Monday if the DeflateGate drama has been an embarrassment for the NFL, but the commissioner didn’t sound regretful about the conflict and said it’s the courts’ fault it has dragged out.

“The legal system is deliberate, if you want to put it that way,” Goodell said after a shrug. “It’s unfortunate because it does impact on our game. But we don’t encourage that, obviously, and we’d like to get this resolved.”

An en banc hearing means the appeal would be heard by the entire 2nd Circuit bench. One basis of the appeal will be that commissioner Roger Goodell ignored precedent when he gave a four-game suspension to the quarterback.

“This case arises from an arbitration ruling by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that undermines the rights and expectations of parties to collective bargaining agreements, and runs roughshod over the rule of law,” the lengthy appeal reads. “Goodell superintended a multimillion-dollar investigation into purported football deflation during the 2015 AFC Championship Game—an investigation he falsely portrayed as independent.

DeflateGate came back to shatter our idyllic NFL offseason. Tom Brady’s four-game suspension was reinstated by the United States’ Second District Court of Appeals on Monday, putting a story that dates back to 2014 back in national headlines just days before the 2016 NFL Draft.

The story won’t end after Monday. Brady and the Patriots fought madly to have the suspension overturned initially, a battle they won when a federal judge ruled before the 2015 season that commissioner Roger Goodell overstepped his authority. They have recourse to get the decision reversed. Unfortunately for them, the Second Circuit parsed the language of the collective bargaining agreement and laid out how Roger Goodell acted within his power according to the CBA that players agreed to in 2011.

Brady, 38, received the punishment in May 2015, shortly after a report was published by the NFL that alleged that the Patriots deflated footballs during an AFC Championship victory over the Indianapolis Colts to make them easier to throw and catch. In July, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell upheld the suspension after hearing an appeal, but the ban was eventually overturned in September, allowing Brady to play the entire 2015 season.

“We hold that the Commissioner properly exercised his broad discretion under the collective bargaining agreement and that his procedural rulings were properly grounded in that agreement and did not deprive Brady of fundamental fairness,” the court wrote in its opinion, released on Monday.

The appeal isn’t a surprise, the NFL is following through on a promise it made after Berman’s ruling in September, but it does mean a revisitation to a story many might have thought was over nearly two months ago.

Why the NFL would want to exhume a story that ended poorly for commissioner Roger Goodell and the league is a good question. Yahoo’s Frank Schwab nailed the crux: “It would appear the NFL doesn’t want commissioner Roger Goodell’s authority questioned, and not fighting the vacation of Brady’s suspension would invite others to pick holes in an unfair process.”

South Park debuted its New England Patriots episode and boy, they didn’t miss a beat. The cartoon went to town on Tom Brady’s DeflateGate debacle, even incorporating NFL commissioner Roger Goodell into the episode.

The story? Well, after being dealt four days of detention by a new principal, Cartman is having none of it and demands it gets overturned -- then, well, things took a turn:

Former assistant equipment manager and full-time employee John Jastremski and former officials locker room attendant Jim McNally, a part-time employee, will reportedly have new roles when they return to the Patriots. The Patriots requested last week that the pair be allowed back to work, but the NFL asked to meet with them first before making any decision.

Jastremski and McNally were indefinitely suspended in May after the release of the Wells Report. In the 243-page report, text messages between the two Patriots employees were included, which appeared to show proof that the footballs were deflated at Tom Brady’s request. Despite maintaining innocence, Patriots owner Robert Kraft indefinitely suspended Jastremski and McNally at the NFL’s request when he accepted a fine and the forfeiture of draft picks as punishment for the scandal.

Jastremski and McNally were suspended indefinitely shortly after investigator Ted Wells’ report was released in early May. The Patriots requested Monday that Jastremski and McNally be allowed back to work.

Jastremski and McNally were the stars of the Wells report. Wells published several of their personal text messages, including one in which McNally refers to himself as “the deflator,” which served as one of the cruxes of the NFL’s claim that the Patriots and Brady were intentionally deflating footballs.

A league spokesman acknowledged on Wednesday that the question was under review, despite reports that the Patriots had made several requests since Monday to have the two men reinstated.

The Boston Herald’s Jeff Lowe cleared up any confusion about how the suspensions were actually handed down. Initially during the investigation, the NFL pointedly asked the Patriots, “Are you going to suspend Jastremski and McNally or should the league do it?” and the team essentially filled that direct request, which is why the Patriots are now waiting for approval from the league to reinstate the two men.

“I’m excited to run out there Thursday night. It’s obviously been a long seven months for everybody. I think now the goal is focus on what my job is and that’s go out there and help our team win,” Brady said, via NESN. “Obviously I have a lot of personal feelings. I really don’t care to share many of those. I need to think about what I need to do moving forward.”

“Mostly, we have to focus on what our job is, and that’s to put that celebration behind us,” he said.

While the appeal of his suspension dragged on for months, Tom Brady has remained relatively quiet about the DeflateGate situation. Now that the judge has ruled in his favor and overturned the four-game suspension handed down by the NFL, Brady has broken his silence, saying among other things that he’s “sorry our league had to endure this.”

Brady posted the statement on his Facebook account, but is not gloating in victory. “I don’t think it has been good for our sport - to a large degree, we have all lost,” Brady said. He also said it is a privilege to play in the NFL and that he will always try to act in a way that makes the NFL community proud.

If you have a cell phone or a credit card, you are almost certainly subject to an arbitration clause. This clause offers you no real benefits and serves only to make life better for the company that issued you that phone or credit card, as it prevents you from suing the company on your own or joining a class action.

Should you feel you’ve been mistreated by this company, the arbitration clause means they determine how and where and on what terms your complaint will be addressed, and the companies have a very, very good winning percentage.

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- “My father took me by the hand when I was a kid and we walked along the beach. He said, `You have a wonderful way of not holding grudges that can hurt you. Stay that way and you’ll have a happy life. And when you feel high and mighty, come back here and look out at the ocean and how vast it is and look beneath you and know from both that your life is like a blink of an eye, like a grain of sand.”

-- from an interview with Robert Kraft in New Orleans in 2002

New England is a -400 favorite to advance to the playoffs this season, according to sportsbooks monitored by OddsShark.com, moving up on Thursday from the -350 line that they had been sitting at prior to Brady having his suspension squashed.

The Patriots have won the AFC East 11 times over the last 12 years and have won 10 or more games in every one of those seasons. With Brady back in the fold, New England should be one of the NFL’s safest bets to make the postseason.

“As I have said during the process and throughout his Patriots career, Tom Brady is a classy person of the highest integrity,” the statement read. “He represents everything that is great about this game and this league. Yet, with absolutely no evidence of any actions of wrongdoing by Tom in the Wells report, the lawyers at the league still insisted on imposing and defending unwarranted and unprecedented discipline. Judge Richard Berman understood this and we are greatly appreciative of his thoughtful decision that was delivered today. Now, we can return our focus to the game on the field.”

The NFL Players’ Association issued a similar statement earlier in the day, thanking Berman for his decision, while the NFL respectfully disagreed and announced plans to appeal.

“We are grateful to Judge Berman for hearing this matter, but respectfully disagree with today’s decision,” the statement read. “We will appeal today’s ruling in order to uphold the collectively bargained responsibility to protect the integrity of the game. The commissioner’s responsibility to secure the competitive fairness of our game is a paramount principle, and the league and our 32 clubs will continue to pursue a path to that end. While the legal phase of this process continues, we look forward to focusing on football and the opening of the regular season.”

“The Award is premised upon several significant legal deficiencies,” Berman wrote of the four-game suspension. Nowhere in his decision does Berman make note of whether he believes Brady to be guilty of deflating football. The ruling, rather, is based on the NFL’s mishandling of the investigative and discipline process.

Tom Brady got his four-game suspension overturned in federal court on Thursday, meaning he’ll be able to play in the Patriots’ season opener next week. But the ruling by Judge Richard Berman has bigger ramifications than Brady’s return. (Well, maybe not to Patriots fans, but hear me out.)

You might think that the overturned suspension means that a federal judge found that Brady didn’t cheat, but that’s not really what was up for debate. Rather, Berman’s ruling comes down harshly on the way NFL commissioner Roger Goodell handled the Brady case. Berman found that Goodell well overstepped his boundaries by essentially making up a punishment for Brady because he felt like it, and that Goodell stacked the arbitration process so that it would be unfair to Brady.

NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith has released a statement reacting to Judge Richard Berman’s decision to nullify the NFL’s four-game suspension of Tom Brady.

The union’s statement takes a celebratory tone, which was echoed by NFLPA Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs George Atallah on Twitter.

STRUTTIN’. But which is struttiest?

Just makes the post-courtroom Tom look even smugger.

Tom Brady’s four-game suspension from the NFL for his role in DeflateGate has been nullified by a federal judge.

The case argued by Brady and the NFLPA centered on the argument that it was unfair because NFL commissioner Roger Goodell appointed himself to hear Brady’s appeal under the league’s personal conduct policy. The union had planned to call Goodell as a witness in the initial appeal, but was denied that opportunity when Goodell appointed himself as the appeal officer.

Roger Goodell is not exactly the most popular sports figure in the world. He’s disliked by a lot of people for a wide variety of reasons. The handling of the DeflateGate saga and his decision to suspend Tom Brady has made Goodell even more disliked in Boston than many places.

That has led to a lot of unflattering comments about Goodell, a few hot takes and even some bad jokes. On Wednesday, we got a combination of all three from Kirk Minihane on Comcast SportsNet New England’s Arbella Early Edition.