Brady’s suspension upheld by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

Said the NFL in their statement regarding the situation.

Tuesday’s decision means Brady will miss the first four games of the 2015 regular season.

If he accepts the suspension, Brady will sit out games against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars and Dallas Cowboys.

The decision said that Brady exchanged almost 10,000 text messages during a four-month period, and that the league was not able the retrieve the data.

Besides suspending Brady, the NFL in May docked the Patriots a 2016 first-round draft pick and a 2017 fourth-round one, and imposed a $1 million fine.

Wells was widely criticized for reaching such an iffy conclusion. What if Brady admitted, like plenty of quarterbacks have in the months since this story first broke, that he liked his balls inflated below (or above) the league regulations, and that he had made that clear to the men who handle the equipment?

“Mr. Brady denies having been involved in the scheme to deflate the footballs”, Goodell writes.

Wells investigation had no subpoena power and Brady was under no legal obligation to cooperate.

“Most importantly”, Yee continued, “neither Tom nor the Patriots did anything wrong”. And the NFL has no evidence that anything inappropriate occurred.

This raises a real question about what Brady does not want seen on his phone records. “It has been thoroughly discredited by independent third parties”. Tom was completely transparent.

The quarterback then lodged an appeal through the NFL Players Association, which said it was acting “Given the NFL’s history of inconsistency and arbitrary decisions in disciplinary matters”. But “that’s rubbish”, said George Atallah, the NFLPA’s assistant executive director of external affairs. The QB didn’t budge on either point. Brady’s tampering of evidence is certainly a strike against him in court, and one that will likely keep his suspension in place if the courts deem it to be relevant to his punishment. And perhaps years to reach a final verdict.

Yet this case was so different from, say, the incident that occurred at a game in Minnesota in November, when a Carolina Panthers attendant was found warming a football on the sideline.

Thankfully, this involves only footballs, 12.5 psi air pressure and trying to win championships. Brady and the NFLPA disclaimed any need to do so.

The NFL announced in late January that Wells would head an investigation into New England’s alleged use of underinflated balls against the Colts.

I wish it were only about what Brady has done on a football field – those four Super Bowl championships, those three MVP trophies, those remarkable statistics. The cellphone in question was requested by the Wells’ investigators on February 25 of this year and again on March 6, the day the Wells’ investigators interviewed Brady. He does not agree to turn over his cellphone.

Indeed, the Report is wrought with unsupported speculation regarding Mr. Brady’s purported knowledge of, and involvement with, two Patriots employees’ purported conduct, and grasps at dubious, contradictory and mischaracterized circumstantial evidence merely to conclude that it is “more probable than not” that Mr. Brady was “generally aware of” “inappropriate activities.”

There were reports just prior to the decision from Goodell that Brady and the league were working towards a reduction of the suspension to one game. To justify the length of the four-game suspension, Goodell likens deflating footballs to inflating your body via steroids, since both presumably offer a competitive advantage.