COMMENTARY

In one, swift and obnoxious cackle, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told all you need to know about the league’s persecution of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

It is a farce perpetrated by an utter buffoon.

Say what you will about Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tanker Mark Cuban, who last year predicted that the NFL was “10 years away from an implosion,’’ arguing that the league was getting “hoggy,’’ but it was a characteristic that seems prescient, especially for a commissioner that has overstepped his bounds in making his case against Brady and the Patriots.

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,’’ Cuban said.


Sharpen your knives, folks. Brady and the NFL Players Association have huffed and puffed the quarterback’s four-game suspension to the furthest degree, and now they’re about to blow ol’ Roger’s house down.

If Goodell didn’t quite manage it last year with his incessant bungling in regard to the NFL’s domestic abuse policy and the repercussions for such actions, he’s hammered a rusty nail into his legacy in the wake of Deflategate and the Wells Report, an independent assertion so bogusly slanted in the favor of those who paid for it, that the gospel of this whole affair should be treated no more importantly than a coffee receipt. The commissioner blinked and presumed his almighty power strong enough to take down NFL Teflon, an arrogant struggle of power in which the commissioner has led league to an embarrassing loss, a late comeback from Brady on par with the one he led his team on in Super Bowl XLIX.

Whether Ron Wolf — who is being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this weekend — was being sarcastic or not when he slapped Goodell on the arm Thursday night and told him, “Way to go on that Brady thing,’’ is irrelevant to the reaction it elicited from the commissioner. It’s quite clear that Roger is having a jolly, good time with all this, playing make pretend that Brady’s involvement in Deflategate is worth any significant amount of time, never mind the seven months we’ve already managed to waste.


In that one moment, assumptions became definitives.

He’s laughing at Brady.

He’s laughing at the NFLPA.

He’s laughing at the extent of his influence.

He’s laughing at you.

It’s Brady and his supporters who are going to get the final guffaw, however, a simple matter that became all the more clear this past week with the release of the quarterback’s testimony at NFL league offices back in June. While Brady comes off as aloof during parts of the 457 pages, not to mention cocky and star-studded in the email exchanges shared and submitted to court, Goodell comes off as a clueless dolt, interjecting at random points during the proceeding as if to remind himself that he’s still in the room. Even to the biggest rah-rah Roger owner in the NFL, the reaction had to be, “This is the moron we’ve entrusted with our league?’’

The argument for Goodell is that he’s led the NFL to untold riches as the most cunning commissioner in all of North American sports. But his is also a job that a chimpanzee with a second-grade education could excel at. Football’s popularity, despite the league’s image problem with domestic abuse, concussions, widespread greed, and duplicitous public relations scams (pink October, for one), is never going away, but instead of heading a league office that is only merely despicable, Goodell has made his workplace into something perhaps even worse; an untrustworthy environment.

Patriots owner Bob Kraft may have been the first to publicly slam the commissioner, but he won’t be the last to denigrate a man whose power has gone the wayward way of a backyard sprinkler hose, vacillating every which way with the winds of public perception. But the gig is up.


Goodell flat-out lied about Brady’s conversations with equipment manager John Jastremski, which the commissioner portrayed as undermining “the suggestion that the communications addressed only preparation of footballs for the Super Bowl rather than the tampering allegations and their anticipated responses to inquiries about the tampering’’ in his 20-page ruling upholding Brady’s four-game ban.

After the release of the testimony, we find that simply isn’t the case, as Brady openly admits he and the still-suspended Jastremski talked about the allegations.

Of course, it’s easy to excuse Goodell’s aloofness in this matter, seeing as his place at the appeal could probably be characterized as physically “present,’’ albeit with the whistling prowess Steamboat Willie looping in his head.

It’s clear now why there will be no settlement. Even if Brady and the Patriots did something with the footballs during the AFC Championship game, the quarterback and the NFLPA simply can’t lose in court against Goodell and his dim-witted band of ax-grinders. Brady can now prove Goodell had an agenda. He can prove dishonesty within the league’s offices. He can prove the worthlessness of the NFL’s king, an emperor who has been undressed by a scandal far less grave than what the last calendar year has wrought the NFL.

As for Wolf, architect of the Green Bay Packers under Brett Favre, he and Patriots head coach Belichick are confidants, so it’s hard to take what he said to the commissioner too lightly or seriously. “We talk frequently. Tremendous respect for Ron and Ron’s philosophy,’’ Belichick said of Wolf last January upon the announcement that he’d be heading to the Hall.

“Being a student of the game and understanding the rules and regulations and all that, taking advantage of something unique, is the essence of Bill Belichick and why he’s on top of the game,’’ Wolf told the Boston Globe earlier this year, on the eve of the Super Bowl. “He’s exceptional at what he does. I don’t know how to phrase it any better.

Make your own choice as to whether or not that’s an underlying dig.

There’s less ambiguity in Goodell’s chortle of glee, a reaction so full of mock and ridicule that it will be featured prominently in the aftermath of his undoing.

Brady and the NFLPA are sitting down to dinner and about to slaughter the hoggiest hog of them all.

New England Patriots’ 2015 schedule