DeflateGate: Tom Brady Offered To Help Find Text Messages

I have my issues with Mike Florio. He is a journalistic hack, he has an ego the size of New York City, and he just seems like an overall (bad word I can’t use in this post). But he has been phenomenal with his coverage of deflate-gate, as he has poked a trillion holes in the NFL’s arguments throughout this whole disaster, and he has found another one after moron Roger Goodell upheld Tom Brady’s four-game suspension yesterday.

"But like the much longer Wells report, closer inspection of the Goodell decision undermines the primary conclusion. And, as usual, the Achilles heel can be found in a footnote.Specifically, it can be found at footnote 11 on page 12: “After the hearing and after the submission of post-hearing briefs, Mr. Brady’s certified agents offered to provide a spreadsheet that would identify all of the individuals with whom Mr. Brady had exchanged text messages during [the relevant time] period; the agents suggested that the League could contact those individuals and request production of any relevant text messages that they retained. Aside from the fact that, under Article 46, Section 2(f) of the CBA, such information could and should have been provided long before the hearing, the approach suggested in the agents’ letter — which would require tracking down numerous individuals and seeking consent from each to retrieve from their cellphones detailed information about their text message communications during the relevant period — is simply not practical.”In English, here’s what the footnote means: Although the text messages couldn’t be retrieved directly from Brady’s phone, his agents provided all of the phone numbers with which Brady exchanged text messages. His agents also said that the league could attempt to get the actual text messages from the phones of the people with whom Brady communicated, but the league refused to attempt to try, claiming that it would be too hard to track down the various people and to persuade them to cooperate."

Comprende?

Essentially, Tom Brady destroyed his cell phone, but then offered the NFL all the resources they needed to find every single person he texted, so they could find the messages on their phones. However Goodell claimed it wasn’t reasonable to do all that in the time they had after the appeal….35 days.

Seriously, Goodell? You couldn’t go find these guys in 35 days? It’s actually understandable, because Goodell was probably busy sitting on his butt using his useless, empty mind to live his sad, pathetic life to the fullest.

On to court. Good luck, NFL.