Tom Brady is human and he is flawed, but he’s made an enormous contribution to football. The NFL would be better off if it just admitted all of that.

The grand sports morality play entered its umpteenth act this week as New England Patriots quarterback, reigning Super Bowl MVP and giant fameball Tom Brady appealed his four-game suspension for his role in Deflategate. He spent 11 hours in front of National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell arguing against a four-game suspension for what’s been a huge distraction and a complete waste of fans’ time, if not an insult to their intelligence.

The NFL already docked the Patriots $1 million and two draft picks for failing to prevent employees from under-inflating footballs during the team’s 45-7 blowout win over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship Game. However, amid this week’s appeal hearing and the weeks of league deliberation that will follow, this has oddly boiled down to the NFL versus Tom Brady over his failure to cooperate with their investigation. That same charge merited only a $50,000 fine for former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre in 2010, but we’re going to get a protracted battle over what Brady did or didn’t say to Patriots staff that could last well into the start of the season.

It’s going to involve some aw-shucks Mr. America brand management from Brady and Co., but it’s also going to be met with unwavering resolve and a big power grab from Goodell. The league will say that the integrity of the game is at stake and anything less than a four-game suspension for Brady somehow undermines that.

“ You can punish athletes monetarily, you can ban them from the game when their career ends and you can affix a *, # or parenthetical caveat to their achievements, but attempting to wash them away washes their fans away with them. ”

Except that even if that appeal holds, Brady will still be the reigning MVP and will still have a fourth Super Bowl ring on his finger. Oh, and the crowd at Foxboro will only cheer him more vociferously — and reserve other, less glowing appraisals for Goodell — when Brady’s suspension ends. However, there are much greater implications for football west of New England.

It needs only to consider the latest mark against Major League Baseball pariah Pete Rose that ESPN’s “Outside The Lines” unearthed this week. While Rose has been banned from baseball for nearly 30 years for betting on the game as a manager, a notebook of bets he made on baseball while still playing the game end his chances for being reinstated and enshrined in the game’s Hall of Fame. Rose is ethically challenged and a champion liar, but the fact is he’s still the game’s all-time hits leader and one of the greatest baseball minds to ever play the game.

After ESPN’s finding was announced, not only did Rose’s employers at Fox Sports say he’d keep his job as an analyst, but even ESPN’s own Jayson Stark argued for his inclusion in the Hall of Fame, albeit with an admission of guilt on his plaque. Why? Because his offense doesn’t erase his accomplishments, which include three World Series rings, a Rookie of the Year award and shelves full of other hardware. They still happened, and no amount of shunning or moralizing make them less so.

A hard-line on Rose led to the Steroid Era stance that allowed baseball writers to erase the single-season home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa that basically saved the game in the 1990s after a labor dispute wiped out the 1994 World Series. It allowed them to shun perhaps the greatest hitter the game has ever produced (Barry Bonds) and one of its most dominant pitchers (Roger Clemens). In doing so, it took a generation that grew to love baseball after the strike and basically discarded its entire attachment to the game.

Baseball attendance peaked at 79.4 million in 2007 after a 10-year ballpark building boom that saw 11 of the league’s 30 teams build new facilities. By last year, that attendance had dropped to 73.7 million. Meanwhile, during that same span, the average number of World Series viewers slumped from 17.1 million to just 13.8 million. Meanwhile, the average age of a World Series viewer has drifted up from 48 in 2004 to 54 last year.

Erase the history, and you risk erasing the sport. Professional cycling’s boosters at NBC learned this after seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong was stripped of his titles in 2012 for doping. An average of more than 600,000 viewers tuned in for Lance’s last winning Tour de France run in 2005, with 1.7 million watching the final day alone. Last year, two years after Armstrong’s rebuke, NBC averaged 288,000 viewers for the Tour and less than 960,000 for the last stage. Nobody denies Armstrong cheated, but stripping him of titles — and those of Bjarne Riis, Floyd Landis and Alberto Contador in their 1996, 2006 and 2010 wins, respectively — hasn’t exactly sent folks flocking back to the sport.

You can punish athletes monetarily, you can ban them from the game when their career ends and you can affix a *, # or parenthetical caveat to their achievements, but attempting to wash them away washes their fans away with them. Nobody is going after Brady’s records, rings or other accomplishments, but if the NFL can’t come up with something better than lack of cooperation, it should levy a fine and be done with it. If the NFL wants to call Brady a cheater, however, it’s going to take a whole lot more to pry him off the field, or to diminish the legacy he’s built on it.

If the NFL is going to punish Brady once he’s already put fans in the seats, viewers in front of the screen and cash in the league’s coffers, the least it can do is not pretend it changes anything.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.