WaPo's Jenkins: Looks like judge will lay the smack to NFL in flimsy Deflategate case

I guess Roger Goodell thinks he is Barack Obama. Constitution schmonstitution. Bylaws schmylaws. The big cheese can just do whatever he wants, and no one can tell him otherwise. Even the federal courts won't do anything about it! Worked for Obama!

But it doesn't look like it's going to work for Goodell, whose decision to arbitrarily smear the reputation of Tom Brady without any real evidence is getting some pretty tough attention from U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman. Now many of you probably just presume at this point that Brady cheated in the AFC Championship Game against the Colts by ordering team staff to deflate the footballs. You think that because Goodell "ruled" that this was the case, based on an "investigation" by the highly discredited Ted Wells. Judge Berman, on the other hand, has seen the "evidence" (or lack of same) and he is not so impressed. Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins, who has been following this case closely from the beginning, smells an epic smackdown coming on Goodell and the NFL:

What they didn’t count on was a judge who refuses to accept the premise that he is supposed to shut up and rubber stamp. And who has decided to pour some sunshine on the entire process and give us a delightful lesson in the labor principles at stake. Berman’s scathing questioning of the NFL in a hearing this week demonstrated that arbitration is not meant to preclude judicial review or to force an employee to surrender to the whims of power-crazed managers. While Goodell has sweeping powers to issue player discipline under the CBA, Berman made it clear he does not have the right to willfully misstate and mislead, gin up phony investigations based on pseudo-science and then issue draconian four-game suspensions simply because he’s furious Brady and the New England Patriots don’t say, “All hail to the emperor." "There has to be some basic process of fairness that needs to be followed,” Berman said.

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Time after time, Berman issued observations from the bench that made the NFL attorneys’ shoulders curl. He called the league’s lack of proof that anything was deflated in the AFC championship game “a conspicuous absence.” Perhaps most embarrassingly, he publicly busted Goodell for his irrational twisting of highly equivocal evidence into the assertion that Brady masterminded an illegal “scheme” that was on par with steroids. “A quantum leap,” Berman scoffed.

Now if Goodell really railroaded one of the NFL's all-time greatest quarterbacks (and yes, I think four Super Bowl wins justifies that description), the obvious question is why. How does it benefit the league for him to do that? Here's what I think: Goodell became highly sensitive to the PR hits the league took starting in last year's preseason with the video of Ray Rice assaulting his wife in an elevator, and the mere two-game suspension Rice received prompted a backlash that only exacerbated Goodell's sensitivity to the criticism. At that point I think he decided to do a major reversal and go full hardass on any player who even appeared to have done anything embarrassing to the league. This started with Adrian Peterson, who was suspended for all but one game last season as a result of the excessive force he used in disciplining his young son, in spite of there really being no process established to justify that particular length of suspension. First Peterson was suspended for just one game, then his reinstatement brought criticism from the public, the media and corporate sponsors, and suddenly he was out indefinitely. Goodell was making it up as he went along, based entirely on public reaction to his decisions. Then came the Brady story. It started with members of the Colts publicly complaining that the footballs used by the Patriots seems softer than usual in the AFC Championship Game, which the Patriots won 45-7. The media quickly jumped on the story and cast aspersions on Brady, judging his every move as evidence of his innocence or guilt without really knowing or even understanding what the evidence said. At that point, I think Goodell (still very much in PR crisis management mode), made a snap decision that Brady had to pay some price so the NFL claim it didn't tolerate cheating. He figured that if an investigation later exonerating Brady, the public would never believe in his innocence and would accuse the NFL of whitewashing the whole thing. So Goodell decided to make sure Brady would appear guilty, and instructed Ted Wells to conduct his "investigation" with that outcome in mind. I don't think Goodell ever thought it would get to federal court, and now that it's there, he's doing his best Obama imitation and claiming the nature of the evidence and the integrity of the investigation don't matter because he's the commissioner and he can do whatever he wants. Judge Berman doesn't appear to be buying it, and shouldn't. Goodell is completely out of control and he has no integrity left. Tom Brady deserve gigantic recompense from the league for what's been done to his reputation, and the owners should fire Roger Goodell tomorrow.