OT: Transcript of Brady appeal released
EDIT: Sorry if already posted - I looked but couldn't find a topic about this.
Deadspin published the transcript of Tom Brady's appeal hearing last night, including some key highlights from the transcript. It makes for absolutely hilarious reading. Take a look.
I love Ballghazi because it exposes the corruption and profound stupidity of Roger Goodell and the NFL's other top leaders without the sadness and fury that come from reading about domestic violence. It is a wonderful scandal and I hope it continues to fester and humiliate the NFL for months and years to come.
Also, Charles Pierce's column about it at Grantland is terrific. A sample:
Meanwhile, Goodell’s strong support of the NFL’s own decision gave every preening moralist within reach of a keyboard a chance to yell about “cheating” and what ever can we tell the children? More than a few people advised Brady to suck it up and take the penalty because you can’t fight City Hall, overlooking the fact that, in this particular case, City Hall is presided over by a guy who couldn’t pour juice out of his loafers if the instructions were written on the heel.
Magnificent.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:13 AM ^
Am I dick for thinking this should be left for the World Wide Leader to get the clicks?
August 5th, 2015 at 12:20 PM ^
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August 5th, 2015 at 10:17 AM ^
RG - Why did you ask your assistant to destroy your mobile phone?
TB - Because you are incompetent, the NFL is incompetent, and I have no faith whatsoever that my personal information would not be leaked. And I have no faith whatsoever that you and your staff would not "research, share, and analyze" some of the personal photos I have of my wife.
RG - You realize that this sounds contemptuous.
TB - 4 games for supposedly encouraging our staff to do what every other QB in the league does? For doing what you fostered, years ago, when you allowed visiting QBs to use balls controlled by the visiting team's QBs? For not understanding the basic gas law? Did a single person on your staff take high school physics?
RG - You know, talk like that makes me unlikely to change my mind. I like nicer talk.
TB - OK, how's this? How about if we pretend I raped the footballs, or beat them senseless? Would that be enough to reduce this to a one game suspension?
This may or may not be accurate, by the way, since I imagined it.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:24 AM ^
But you have no idea how sad I was to read that last block quote.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:23 AM ^
I went back and forth on whether to include that disclaimer (over the two minutes or so I was writing it), and decided that several folks might actually take it at face value and get frustrated when they found that it wasn't 100% accurate. So I erred on the side of caution.
Although my gut tells me it probably is 100% accurate.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:56 AM ^
I figured out that it for sure wasn't real at "I like nicer talk" and was very disapointed but I think the disclaimer was probably still necessary. Either way, bravo.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^
I kept reading this in SNL Sean Connery's voice
August 5th, 2015 at 11:07 AM ^
So.... Roger, what exactly would you say you DO here at the NFL?
August 5th, 2015 at 11:11 AM ^
That was AWESOME! I was so loving it and then you pull the rug out, I wish Tom had said those things. Nevertheless, well played and upvote and Tom is looking to give you a high five.
If Brady raped the footballs, would that cause their psi to be a bit low?
August 5th, 2015 at 10:19 AM ^
Mr. Everyone Murders, thanks for the laugh
August 5th, 2015 at 10:24 AM ^
I'll just go ahead and +1 Pierce for the Inspector Clouseau reference, because this seems like a typical Goodell-led session...
August 5th, 2015 at 10:33 AM ^
That is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. Brilliant!
August 5th, 2015 at 10:30 AM ^
Pretty awesome that he snuck in a "Go Blue" on p. 12 and a "Fuck Ohio" on p. 37.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:33 AM ^
No, the state is still called "Ohio." Even with Hoke gone.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:14 PM ^
Maybe I'm blind (really, I mostly am) but I just ain't seein' it...where on page 12 and page 37?
August 5th, 2015 at 12:36 PM ^
Look in the footnotes and you'll find what you're looking for.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:43 AM ^
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actually, it's "pour piss" in the popular saying.
Other simlar sayings:
"If brains were dynamite, he couldn't blow his nose."
"If you shoved his brain up a gnat's ass, it'd bounce around like a BB in a boxcar."
August 5th, 2015 at 10:48 AM ^
I have slogged my way through about a quarter of the transcript....the NFL again shines through as being lead by an incompetent asshole willing to forget the truth to keep the pressure off of himself. It tells you a lot about the ownership of the NFL that Goodell remains the commissioner.
Other than the season being potentially compromised by Brady's absence, should the NFLPA/Brady not be able to enjoin the suspension, it's a shame that this case will not go through a full-blown trial with an adequate discovery period beforehand.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:59 AM ^
The NFL's entire argument here seems to be "yeah, well, I just think you're wrong no matter what, so fuck you."
I know Goodell is a slappy for the NFL owners, and they don't really give a shit, but at some point they have to realize that they could pay someone $30M a year who is slightly less incompetent. The more Roger talks, the more he just sounds like a clueless asshole. I mean shit, he makes Dave Brandon look awesome. Even Brandon would know this is all bad for the NFL brand.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:24 AM ^
at some point, a majority of the owners will have had enough and kick Goodell out. Most of these owners (with a few very notable exceptions) are smart people, and they have to know all this crap being done in the league office is hurting the NFL brand. I would think the fact that people will probably continue going to the game or watching them on TV despite how much of an industrial-sized douche barrel the commissioner is, is the only reason he's still employed.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:30 AM ^
I think the NFL's entire argument is based upon an approach where they don't care about being right or wrong. There has been no semblance of a rational approach since this mess started. Wells was paid by the NFL to "investigate" but that does not mean that Wells used a purely objective analysis for his conclusions. He was paid by the NFL for shit's sake. Had Goodell wanted objectivity, the NFL and the NFLPA would have agreed upon some third party to go on a fact finding mission.
A couple of guys at the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, took it upon themselves to critique the Wells report, which they shot full of holes. Here's a link in case anyone wishes to read it, and the abstract:
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/On-the-Wells-report.pdf
In the current “Deflategate” controversy, the New England Patriots have been accused of illicitly deflating footballs before the start of their 2015 American Football Conference championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. The National Football League and the lawyers it hired have produced a report—commonly known as the “Wells report”—that has been used to justify penalties against the Patriots and quarterback Tom Brady. Although the Wells report finds that the Patriots footballs declined in pressure significantly more than the Colts balls in the first half of the game, our replication of the report’s analysis finds that it relies on an unorthodox statistical procedure at odds with the methodology the report describes. It also fails to investigate all relevant scenarios. In addition, it focuses only on the difference between the Colts and Patriots pressure drops. Such a difference, however, can be caused either by the pressure in the Patriots balls dropping below their expected value or by the pressure in the Colts balls rising above their expected value. The second of these two scenarios seems more likely based on the absolute pressure measurements. Logistically, the greater change in pressure in the Patriots footballs can be explained by the fact that sufficient time may have passed between halftime testing of the two teams’ balls for the Colts balls to warm significantly, effectively inflating them.
They are intentionally delegitimizing their own championship game and exposing the fact that their own procedure for mearsuing the psi of footballs has less controls than a typical high-school chemistry project. This is a no-win situation for them.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:16 AM ^
Brandon actually seriously considered going for the NFL commissioner job before Goodell was named. Funny considering I see a lot of similarities between Goodell and Brandon in regards to attention to detail and general smugness.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:12 PM ^
Where did you hear that? I would like to see some proof.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:26 PM ^
Brandon talked about it when I saw him talk at Ross in 2011. It came up when he spoke of his path to becoming AD. Below is the first link that comes up when I googled "David Brandon NFL commissioner".
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20100105/FREE/100109976/dominos-ce…
August 5th, 2015 at 11:22 AM ^
I particularly enjoyed the part where the NFL lawyer asked Brady to confirm that January occurs between November and March. Had to read that twice to make sure I didn't misunderstand.
I think there's probably a part missing from the transcript where Brady says "yes, January is month number one" and demonstrates the number one with a middle finger.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:44 AM ^
Six months later, Mortensen deletes inaccurate Deflategate tweet
But as many people have learned when they tweeted something and then wished they could take it back, just deleting a mistake doesn’t make it go away. Mortensen’s tweet (“NFL has found that 11 of the Patriots footballs used in Sunday’s AFC title game were under-inflated by 2 lbs each, per league sources”) still lives in the many news stories that quoted it. And Mortensen’s tweet was used for months to shape the Deflategate story. Even though PFT and others cast doubt on the report almost immediately, and even though the Patriots pleaded with the league office to correct the record, official confirmation that the balls were not as under-inflated as Mortensen’s source claimed didn’t come until the Wells Report was released months later. That’s been one of the maddening things about the whole Deflategate mess: Accurate information has been hard to come by, and the gaps have been filled with inaccurate information. Mortensen’s “2 lbs each” tweet was one of the big pieces of inaccurate information. It’s now off Mortensen’s Twitter timeline, long after the damage was done.
Don’t let accurate information get in the way of a good story. I’ve lost all respect for Mortensen and ESPN.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:32 AM ^
I just don't see how the NFL can back down from the stance that they've taken. It's not happening and the result is pretty entertaining.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:36 AM ^
Halfway through reading this I stopped and realized they spent millions of dollars and hours and hours of time pain stakingly experimenting and analyzing and creating written reports with real live lawyers over the difference in a few psi and that people are calling Tom Brady a cheater because of because he may have had knowledge that they were being deflated. Even if he did it himself . . . What the fuck is wrong with these people? This is like hiring a team of lawyers to review security footage to determine if someone knowingly jay walked while trying to get to work on time. John Oliver needs to get in on this. It's kind of weird and awkward that they brought out the big guns for such a small crime.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:46 AM ^
It all makes sense when you realize that the "scandal" was ginned up for the benefit of the NFL. A league that had nominal integrity in the public eye (domestic abuse, PEDs, sexual assaults, murdering all-star tight ends, concussions, repetitive impact cerebral issues, etc.) desperately needed to get the WWL and others jabbering about something other than scandal.
The Deflateghazi is a "made-to-order" scandal. It gives Goodell and his cronies to blather on about their integrity, and so far Brady has done a poor job of firing back.
What I'd love to see is Brady on the offensive. It's gone too far for him to apologize now (and he seems - understandably - disinclined to). I'd love to see Brady point out that this is a manufactured distraction, that the owners are playing along because they hate the Patriots, and that the NFL has plenty to sweep up on their own doorstep.
In any event, that they made this saggy balls scandal a major issue is not surprising to me. In the short term it serves the NFL's interests.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:58 AM ^
This is exactly correct. This pushed the negative press away from real issues such as tramatic brain injuries, rape, domestic violence, drug use, steroids, assault, suicide, etc. Unfortunately, the sheep have been successfully herded and ESPN lacks the balls to ask the serious question here: Why do we honestly care about this story in the light of all that could be reported about the NFL.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:08 PM ^
Yep. The NFL already had deflategate be the opening headline on the nightly news on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, SportsCenter, etc. Speaking of the media, Chris Mortensen today deleted his tweet that started this story. So, the NFL drummed up a controversy that completely took the Domestic Violence narrative out of the media by feeding false information to ESPN. Shocking. Notice how we aren’t talking about woman beaters anymore, but instead talking about football inflation? Mission accomplished.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:13 PM ^
I agree, but I hope it doesn't end up benefiting the NFL. I think for every action that breaks the law there should be an opposite and equal response and appropriate allocation of time and resources in reagrds to the punishment of the crime. Not every penalty or punishment will be perfect, but the NFL isn't even in the ballpark.
Just in case the NFL read this comment here is another example to illustrate in a way they can undertand.
If little Timmy doesn't eat his veggies (or Eucalyptus) the parents might take away a small toy as a penalty and to change the behavior. That's in the ballpark of reasonability. If they call a family meating and spend 5 hours creating pie charts and graphs showing how a lack of nutrition may or may not have consequences later in life depending on the case studies you reference and call the neighbor to come over as a witness and to perform a motivational speech and lock him in his room for 3 days, it means that the parents need to get a fucking life and stop ruining their perfectly good child. This would be a good reaction if they found him passed out with a heroin needle in his arm, but not good for not finishing broccoli. It's easy!
I digress.
I just love Tom and have to defend him. He gives great back rubs.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:41 AM ^
It is a HUGE positive (for the NFL) deflection from all the bad press last year of domestic violence.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:50 AM ^
only in America can this shit even happen, with well financed goons to ensure it has milked every last drop of it.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:18 PM ^
His first game back, Tom should come out with a football straight from the factory that's never been infated with essentially 0 psi with "suck my deflated balls" embroidered on the side.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:37 PM ^
Count me as one who thinks Goodell has been delighted to make deglategate as overblown as possible - anything to divert awareness from players developing major cognitive troubles and symptoms of AD about 50 years prematurely.
Heck, an NFL team physician just had a publication released which, go figure, denied association btw CTE and football, citing a lack of conclusive evidence.
And despite authors being required to acknowledge conflicts of interests, the guy still tried to be sneaky by neglecting to mention his affiliation with the league. No room in the headlines for this, though. Not when the sanctity of PSI may have been violated.
August 5th, 2015 at 12:53 PM ^
Yes, this entire scandal is absurd. Which makes it all the more amazing and incredible that Tom Brady offered to speak under oath and purjure himself by unequivocally stating he had nothing to do with this (which anybody with half a brain knows is not true).
This story is the gift that keeps on giving. Let's just sit back and enjoy it.
Thanks for letting us know what you half-a-brain types think. You can crawl back under your bridge, now.
I had from the comments, actually, is that Exponent is basically a hired gun firm that essentially crafts whatever story will fit your narrative. In this case, it made conclusions and skewed data and statistical models to ensure that the "facts" fit the NFL's narrative of ball tampering.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/18/business/la-fi-toyota-exponent1…
Quote from linked article (emphasis mine):
Cindy Sage, an environmental consultant in Santa Barbara who specializes in electromagnetic interference, said that much more extensive testing than described in the report would be necessary to find a potential problem.
Sage, who has faced off against Exponent witnesses on safety issues in the past, said Toyota's hiring of Exponent was telling.
"The first thing you know is that when Exponent is brought in to help a company, that company is in big trouble," she said.
Brady's personal emails are now being released:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tom-bradys-reaction-being-told-160000166…
And some nutcases still accuse him of hiding stuff??? When personal crap like this gets release to the public?
Fuck Roger Goodell and his cronies.
August 5th, 2015 at 11:35 PM ^
August 6th, 2015 at 12:02 AM ^
The whole affair is about PR. There's pretense that it is legal or scientific. It's just bad theatrics, and unfortunately for Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, however ignorant and buffonish Roger Goodell may be, he can count on the bulk of the sports talking heads to be even more ignorant. He leaked the smashed cell phone news, knowing that's what everyone would be talking about, and he was right. Almost every sports "reporter" I've heard pontificate on the subject has said something along the lines "if he didn't have anything to hide, why did he smash his phone?"
Almost nobody knows or cares to know about the few pertinent facts in the case; they're too busy watching the shiny object Goodell threw out there to notice that they've been pantsed.