New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft broke his silence about the recent punishments for the team and he's unsurprisingly unhappy. Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback column featured Kraft's first interview since the league issued its DeflateGate sanctions -- a four-game suspension for quarterback Tom Brady, a $1 million fine and the loss of first- and fourth-round draft picks.
Robert Kraft is mad at the NFL about DeflateGate
Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell aren’t best pals anymore after the DeflateGate punishments came down.
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“I just get really worked up. To receive the harshest penalty in league history is just not fair,” Kraft told King. “The anger and frustration with this process, to me, it wasn’t fair.”
Kraft is taking it personally. He maintained Brady's innocence and attacked the league's investigative process and the lack of any direct evidence within the Wells Report, and he even cited potential problems with how officials measured the PSI of the game balls during the AFC Championship. The Patriots owner went on to suggest that the league penalized the Patriots based on the "aroma around this."
He believes Brady’s innocent
How does he know? Because he asked Brady. Kraft told King that he went directly to Brady when the DeflateGate news first surfaced in January, telling the quarterback that if it was true they could “take the hit and move on.” Brady denied it to his boss, and Kraft said that he believed him and that Brady has never lied to him during their 16 years together in New England.
What about Roger?
Goodell’s chummy relationship with Kraft has come under scrutiny before. The two are close -- or they were close. Kraft didn’t have much to say when asked about the current status of his relationship with Goodell. “You’ll have to ask him,” is all he said to King.
Kraft did not accept the notion that the punishment was so harsh because of how other teams and owners viewed his personal relationship with the commissioner.
Regardless of their relationship status, the two men will get to spend some time together this week in San Francisco at the league’s two-day spring meetings.
Problems with the league’s discipline process
Kraft played a prominent role in negotiating the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, the league’s governing document that grants the commissioner the power to discipline players and other employees as he sees fit. Now that it’s the Patriots getting slapped with the harshest penalties in NFL history and their franchise quarterback exiled for a quarter of the season, Kraft is suddenly concerned about the process, worried about the threat it poses to his team and the rest of the league.
“If we’re giving all the power to the NFL and the office of the commissioner, this is something that can happen to all 32 teams. We need to have fair and balanced investigating and reporting. But in this report, every inference went against us ... inferences from ambiguous, circumstantial evidence all went against us. That’s the thing that really bothers me.”
The lack of a “smoking gun” is what really bothers Kraft, and he thinks the NFL is dishing out a huge punishment with lackluster evidence.
Questionable science
In the Wells Report, some science is explained to rationalize the league’s assertion that tampering occurred with the footballs. Using the Ideal Gas Law and the temperature during the game, the report says that the footballs should have lost a little more than a pound per square of inch during the first half, dropping from 12.5 to somewhere between 11.32 and 11.52 pounds.
One gauge found the balls at an average of 11.49 psi and another found the balls at 11.11 psi. The decision to cite the lesser of the two gauges used by referee Walt Anderson and create an exact range based on the Ideal Gas Law doesn’t sound fair to Kraft.
“Anderson has a pregame recollection of what gauge he used, and it’s disregarded, and the [Wells] Report just assumes he uses the other gauge,” Kraft said. “Footballs have never been measured at halftime of any other game in NFL history. They have no idea how much footballs go down in cold weather or expand in warm weather. There is just no evidence that tampering with the footballs ever happened.”
Anderson couldn’t give the NFL a definite answer for which gauge he used prior to the game, but believed that he used a Wilson-logoed gauge to measure the footballs. That gauge was the one that originally measured the footballs at 12.5 psi.
What Kraft wouldn’t say
While Kraft didn’t hold back in his criticism of the league and its sanctions on the team, he did elect to hold some details close to the vest. He chose not to say why the team suspended Jim McNally and John Jastremski, the two employees that sent some incriminating text messages.
He also didn’t discuss whether rumors of Kraft suing the league could be true, although King didn’t rule out the possibility either, calling it a “fluid situation.”
Also fluid is the chance that Kraft will no longer serve as one of the NFL’s most involved owners. Kraft is on five of the NFL’s most significant business committees and chairs the broadcast committee, but he could become less active. He told King that he’d “rather not get into that for a week or two.”
For now, all eyes are on Brady’s appeal of his four-game suspension, which will be heard by Goodell. No date has been set, but Albert Breer of NFL Network reported the appeal will likely be held in June.
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