#DFG: Canceling the Noise

Is there any level of suspension that you would advise Tom to accept?


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Tito's Pullover

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TheoShmeo said:
As to Hernandez, Lex, it was conveyed to me as being a meaningful part of a pattern of the Pats being "bad citizens."  How it was weighted, I don't know, but he said that there are people in the NFL office who are really pissed about how the Pats handled Hernandez and thought that their habit of doing the wrong thing in every instance needed to be punished.
 
My source is definitely not trolling me.  He's a close friend and a former client (semi retired now) and literally has no reason to screw with me. 
Do you have any sense of what your source feels the Patriots should have done differently with respect to Hernandez?  They released him the second they found out he'd be charged with murder.
 

OnWisc

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Ed Hillel said:
 
Agreed on both points. O' Connor has been killing the Patriots since forever, so this is unsurprising. If Brady is factually innocent, Ian O'Connor is towing the line right now, though.
O'Connor's initial article on the situation asserted that the Patriots balls weighed several pounds less than they were supposed to. Upon being alerted that it was psi and not actual weight, the article was amended. I think it went through a couple more iterations before a grammatically accurate version was finally posted. His content is geared toward eliciting clicks and nothing more. It's best to follow Jeter's example and distance yourself from any content put forth by Mr. O'Connor.
 

Bleedred

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Gambler7 said:
 
 
Interestingly, Greg Bedard tweeted this:




 




 
Jonathan is smart.....but he can become unhinged.  Unleashing him would be fraught with peril. i.e.  it may be satisfying at first, but he could really do lasting damage if he's not careful.  Smart move is to keep him muzzled, as he's really not a sympathetic character
 

pappymojo

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Tito's Pullover said:
Do you have any sense of what your source feels the Patriots should have done differently with respect to Hernandez?  They released him the second they found out he'd be charged with murder.
 
The Patriots should have been more like the Ravens.
 

DeJesus Built My Hotrod

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We should really dispense with the "I am done with the NFL", boycotting sponsors and burning effigies posts. Its reactionary bullshit at its worst. Very few here, if any, are going to follow through with those things.

Brady will appeal his suspension but I suspect those hoping for a fight are going to be disappointed. Kraft is surely pissed but once he calms down, he will realize that a battle over this may hurt the Patriots even more. I suspect he will save his bullets for the next battle when he is in a better position to get what he wants.
 

Tyrone Biggums

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pappymojo said:
 
The Patriots should have been more like the Ravens.
If we build a statue of Hernandez in the middle of Patriots place does it reduce the penalty?
 

TheoShmeo

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Tito, my friend said that they think that the Pats knew or should have known that Hernandez was deeply troubled earlier than the time of his indictment and that they should have cut ties with him earlier than they did or, at the very least, done more to guide him.  He did not know the basis for that view. 
 

Ralphwiggum

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If true that the Pats handling of Hernandez had some impact on the penalty, that's fucking insane.  If that doesn't prove this whole thing is a goddamn witch hunt, what does?  If the Pats broke some NFL rule regarding how they handled Aaron Hernandez then fucking punish them for that.  If no rule was broken, how does it have any impact on this situation?
 
Until the investigation into Odin Lloyd's death I don't believe Aaron Hernandez had a single disciplinary issue as an NFL player.  Sure he had red flags coming out of college but so do a lot of players.  The situation is such a fucking outlier, not even his staunchest detractors could have imagined he was capable of murdering multiple people.
 
Effective discipline is supposed to act as both a punishment and a deterrent.  What would the Patriots be punished for in the Hernandez situation?  What behaviors would you be trying to deter in other teams?  The whole thing makes zero fucking sense, which is why it is probably true.
 

Marciano490

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Ralphwiggum said:
If true that the Pats handling of Hernandez had some impact on the penalty, that's fucking insane.  If that doesn't prove this whole thing is a goddamn witch hunt, what does?  If the Pats broke some NFL rule regarding how they handled Aaron Hernandez then fucking punish them for that.  If no rule was broken, how does it have any impact on this situation?
 
Until the investigation into Odin Lloyd's death I don't believe Aaron Hernandez had a single disciplinary issue as an NFL player.  Sure he had red flags coming out of college but so do a lot of players.  The situation is such a fucking outlier, not even his staunchest detractors could have imagined he was capable of murdering multiple people.
 
Effective discipline is supposed to act as both a punishment and a deterrent.  What would the Patriots be punished for in the Hernandez situation?  What behaviors would you be trying to deter in other teams?  The whole thing makes zero fucking sense, which is why it is probably true.
 
I'm too lazy to do it, but I'm sure if someone were to make a list of every franchise who had a player in the last 10 years accused/convincted of a major crime, more than half the league would be covered - Dallas, KC, Baltimore, St. Louis, Carolina, Atlanta - that's just off-hand.
 

DJnVa

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Oh, that's on Facebook? I thought they meant twitter. When I see the @ symbol, that's where I go.
 

NYCSox

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TheoShmeo said:
Tito, my friend said that they think that the Pats knew or should have known that Hernandez was deeply troubled earlier than the time of his indictment and that they should have cut ties with him earlier than they did or, at the very least, done more to guide him.  He did not know the basis for that view. 
 
I eagerly await the stripping of the Ravens franchise. Oh wait.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Who cares? I'm sure the person handling the social media for the New England Patriots wasn't getting the OK from Bob Kraft to do this.
 

Average Reds

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Kenny F'ing Powers said:
Who cares? I'm sure the person handling the social media for the New England Patriots wasn't getting the OK from Bob Kraft to do this.
 
If he didn't, he won't be handling social media for the Pats for much longer.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Average Reds said:
 
If he didn't, he won't be handling social media for the Pats for much longer.
 
That's ridiculous. There's about 35 levels between the social media manager and Bob Kraft on the corporate tree. In companies with such a large matrix, decisions are not unilateral. This was probably approved by a PR director/digital marketing director and that's it. 
 
Bob Kraft has fuckall to do with this.
 

DJnVa

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jsinger121 said:
 
They changed it on twitter too.
 
Weird. Mine isn't updated yet.
 
Anyway, back to important things---has soxhop said he wants Kraft to burn the league offices to the ground lately?
 

Average Reds

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Kenny F'ing Powers said:
 
That's ridiculous. There's about 35 levels between the social media manager and Bob Kraft on the corporate tree. In companies with such a large matrix, decisions are not unilateral. This was probably approved by a PR director/digital marketing director and that's it. 
 
Bob Kraft has fuckall to do with this.
 
I was not implying that this person was going to interact with Bob Kraft. But they are also not going to do something that could be seen as a slap in the face of the NFL without direction from above.
 
As someone who ran the corporate marketing department for a very large corporation, I can guarantee you that whoever gave him the OK to do this had it approved at a high level or they are risking their own position.
 

Leather

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DrewDawg said:
 
 
Anyway, back to important things---has soxhop said he wants Kraft to burn the league offices to the ground lately?
 
You can say that again!
 

lexrageorge

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TheoShmeo said:
Tito, my friend said that they think that the Pats knew or should have known that Hernandez was deeply troubled earlier than the time of his indictment and that they should have cut ties with him earlier than they did or, at the very least, done more to guide him.  He did not know the basis for that view. 
Either your friend, or the one spoon feeding that garbage to your friend, is extremely naive about the random unsavory characters that are on every single team.  The Falcons, Ravens, Panthers, Giants, Steelers, et al, should be punished by the warped logic you are espousing.
 

TheoShmeo

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NYC, I said this was on the list of motivations.  Obviously the NFL wasn't going to punish the Pats for Hernandez in and of itself.  But when it came time to punish based on the ball nonsense, past indiscretions (including how they handled Hernandez) were included in the thought process.  The Pats are looked at as bad citizens with many things playing a part of that.  At least, that is what I was told by someone close to both the Krafts and the NFL office. 
 
Given how out of proportion this penalty is to the actual "crime," it doesn't take a lot to convince me that the NFL had more than a few axes to grind when it meted out "justice" here.
 
Lex, the point is not that the Pats had a killer on their team.  The point is that the NFL thinks that the Pats had knowledge of something that should have caused them to act earlier.  What that is, I have no idea.  And neither my friend nor the person talking to him is remotely naïve.  The NFL may be wrong headed in the extreme in factoring in Hernandez in any way, but my friend is just passing stuff on. 
 

jablo1312

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Bedard just said on Beadle & Zolak that the team basically "jumped on the grenade" for McNally by not making him available for the final interview that Wells & Co. requested. The way he told it, during the BountyGate investigation, Gregg Williams was interviewed a number of times, and the final time the investigative team hit him with a preponderance of evidence that he and the Saints had been lying in various capacities to the league and its lawyers, and Williams "folded on the Saints and came clean". Bedard believes that Wells was going to do the same thing with McNally, basically hitting him things that could induce him to turn on Brady and the team. I'm sure there will be debate about the "evidence" Wells could've shoved in McNally's face, but it does appear that he did lie a couple of times in the investigation (first that he didn't go into the bathroom with the balls, then that he went in there to use a urinal, which that bathroom does not actually contain). If Bedard's story is true, I'm real glad the Pats counsel prevented him from doing that final interview, and potentially turning on the team.
 
Not sure how this plays with the report that the Pats made McNally available by phone; has that been confirmed? Or is it still just a rumor?
 
edit: phrasing/clarification
 

Bleedred

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lexrageorge said:
Either your friend, or the one spoon feeding that garbage to your friend, is extremely naive about the random unsavory characters that are on every single team.  The Falcons, Ravens, Panthers, Giants, Steelers, et al, should be punished by the warped logic you are espousing.
My source was not in the NFL office, but close to someone in the NEP organization that received whispers of the penalty at 8 games (mea culpa).   Theo's source is in the NFL office, if I understand him correctly, and the truth is that the NFL office has proven to be incapable of applying any consistent standard of logic or reason to any number of matters presented to it. It's no surprise that Theo's information is all over the place, because it's coming from the ass clowns in the NFL front office.  
 

dylanmarsh

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https://twitter.com/TroyVincent23/status/595558899517943810
 
Apparently, Tony Dungy and Troy have a stupid hashtag called "Troy and Tony Tuesday" where they ball wash each other and come up with motivational quotes for each other.  This is who we are dealing with here.
 
edit: there's got to be a way to abuse this hashtag today
 

drbretto

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I woke up this morning to check this situation, and I had a totally different reaction to this punishment than the rest of you. I was giddy.
 
Oh, no, not because I believe Brady had anything to do with the possibly imagined crime. This ridiculous overreaction was the only way that the Pats end up fighting this. If it was a 500k fine and a suspension, Brady appeals the suspension down to two games, the team pays the cash and this whoile things gets swept under the rug. 
 
This absurd doubling down by the NFL basically forces the Pats to be heard now. And the backlash is almost entirely on Goodell now. Sure, you'll always have the genuine Pats haters that will never come around (or shut up) but overall, even your (more rational, adult) Jets fans are thinking "ok, this was fun for a couple months, but that penalty is just bullshit".
 
This is the best thing that could have happened. I can't WAIT for act 3.
 

Hoya81

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jablo1312 said:
Bedard just said on Beadle & Zolak that the team basically "jumped on the grenade" for McNally by not making him available for the final interview that Wells & Co. requested. The way he told it, during the BountyGate investigation, Gregg Williams was interviewed a number of times, and the final time the team hit him with a preponderance of evidence that he and the team had been lying in various capacities to the league and its lawyers, and Williams "folded on the team and came clean". Bedard believes that Wells was going to do the same thing with McNally, basically hitting him things that could induce him to turn on Brady and the team. I'm sure there will be debate about the "evidence" Wells could shove in McNally's face, but it does appear that he did lie a couple of times in the investigation (first that he didn't go into the bathroom with the balls, then that he went in there to use a urinal, which that bathroom does not actually contain). If Bedard's story is true, I'm real glad the Pats counsel prevented him from doing that.
 
Not sure how this plays with the report that the Pats made McNally available by phone; has that been confirmed? Or is it still just a rumor?
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/05/12/failure-to-produce-mcnally-one-more-time-made-it-easier-for-nfl-to-hammer-patriots/

Florio got it from a "league source", which can be anyone from the League office or associated with a team, including the Pats.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Average Reds said:
 
I was not implying that this person was going to interact with Bob Kraft. But they are also not going to do something that could be seen as a slap in the face of the NFL without direction from above.
 
As someone who ran the corporate marketing department for a very large corporation, I can guarantee you that whoever gave him the OK to do this had it approved at a high level or they are risking their own position.
 
Changing a twitter avatar to an image of your best player that is currently embroiled in a firestorm is not a "slap in the face" to the NFL. Its catering to Patriot fans that visit their social media profiles. If the twitter account started posting shit like, "We are going to burn the NFL to the ground." or "Tom Brady is innocent and the league is out to get us!", then I'm sure there are more hands in the pot. This is not a big deal. I already agreed that this was probably approved at the director level, so we're agreeing that there is some "direction from above". But this doesn't need to go any further up the corporate chain that that.
 

DJnVa

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dylanmarsh said:
https://twitter.com/TroyVincent23/status/595558899517943810
 
Apparently, Tony Dungy and Troy have a stupid hashtag called "Troy and Tony Tuesday" where they ball wash each other and come up with motivational quotes for each other.  This is who we are dealing with here.
 
edit: there's got to be a way to abuse this hashtag today
 
Bombard it with questions about Troy Vincent colluding with the NFL when he was a union leader.
 
 

DJnVa

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Kenny F'ing Powers said:
 
Changing a twitter avatar to an image of your best player that is currently embroiled in a firestorm is not a "slap in the face" to the NFL
 
And yet ESPN's twitter account has mentioned it, Andrew Brandt has tweeted about it being a shot at Roger...
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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DrewDawg said:
 
And yet ESPN's twitter account has mentioned it, Andrew Brandt has tweeted about it being a shot at Roger...
 
People are reading too deep into shit? No wayyyz...
 

DeJesus Built My Hotrod

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jablo1312 said:
Bedard just said on Beadle & Zolak that the team basically "jumped on the grenade" for McNally by not making him available for the final interview that Wells & Co. requested. The way he told it, during the BountyGate investigation, Gregg Williams was interviewed a number of times, and the final time the investigative team hit him with a preponderance of evidence that he and the Saints had been lying in various capacities to the league and its lawyers, and Williams "folded on the Saints and came clean". Bedard believes that Wells was going to do the same thing with McNally, basically hitting him things that could induce him to turn on Brady and the team. I'm sure there will be debate about the "evidence" Wells could've shoved in McNally's face, but it does appear that he did lie a couple of times in the investigation (first that he didn't go into the bathroom with the balls, then that he went in there to use a urinal, which that bathroom does not actually contain). If Bedard's story is true, I'm real glad the Pats counsel prevented him from doing that final interview, and potentially turning on the team.
 
Not sure how this plays with the report that the Pats made McNally available by phone; has that been confirmed? Or is it still just a rumor?
 
edit: phrasing/clarification
If this is correct there will be no legal battle. Brady will appeal his suspension, he will get a ruling and that will be that. The only way the Pats fight beyond this is if they are 100% squeaky clean and even then, things may come out that prove embarrassing to Brady or the team. Do they really want to risk any more reputational damage?
 
M

MentalDisabldLst

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If only SF121 or someone from ITP had some media credentials.
 
Someday, guys.  Someday.
 

PedroKsBambino

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It would be interesting to see what an antitrust suit challenging the amateur draft which included not only college players, but also an owner, would look like.   
 
This is obviously under the nuclear options category and I do not expect Kraft would be willing to go there.