This is my Thursday column on the NFL’s suspension of Tom Brady. Roger Goodell may have fired his final bullet. On Tuesday, the Commissioner of the NFL upheld his decision to suspend New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady four games for allegedly conspiring with team equipment managers to deflate footballs in the AFC Championship game. The NFL released a 20-page statement claiming Brady destroyed his cell phone “on or shortly…
This is my Saturday column. Deflategate might be Roger Goodell’s Waterloo. He doesn’t know it yet. Napoleon probably didn’t know it, either. Napoleon probably thought France would crush the Duke of Wellington and the armies of the Seventh Coalition. And Goodell probably thinks he can take down the NFL’s most powerful franchise — the Patriots — and biggest star — Tom Brady. You can understand Goodell’s urge to fight this…
Here is my Friday column. The NFL wants to make football more entertaining. The NFL means well. An eight-member competition committee of coaches and executives believes the extra point needs fixing. It’s just like a 20-yard field goal. Last season, kickers made them 99.6 percent of the time. Boring. Perfunctory. “The extra point is almost automatic,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told NFL Network in January. “It’s a very small fraction…
Vernon Davis’ tweets would seem to offer more evidence that Harbaugh was unaware of the dead-period rule and hadn’t issued a hush-hush edict to his players.
Call me naïve or stupidly optimistic – you won’t be the first – but I left the hotel that day with this thought: Good-old, have-a-beer-on-the-Barcalounger Roger, a commissioner so clearly in tune with the populace and in love with the sport, would never let the league reach a labor impasse.
