dcdrew10 said:It's not just one thing. It's a confluence. You have sore loser teams in the face of a dozen plus years of excellence, butt hurt media who cover those loser teams and mediots who BB shits on every chance he gets, power hungry asshats in NFL leadership, particularly a former NFLPA turncoat, an asshole with an ax to grind against the Pats, and a union busting lawyer, all led by an egomaniac of legendary proportions, who likely wanted to knock Kraft down a peg after the whole assistant commissioner thing, and the perfect test case for expanding commissioner powers without negotiating the CBA. If the NFL can do it to their second most marketable star, who is going to stand up to them? And if they lose, who cares, because, like I said a couple hours ago, this is just going to make the NFLPA focus more on player discipline and be willing to give other things up the next negotiation.
In the end this is in 100% win-win situation for the NFL. And it really sucks
Its not even this complicated. This entire offseason has been dominated by talk of deflated footballs and whether or not a franchise QB was generally aware or not of someone doing something nefarious.
Last offseason was dominated by whether or not the NFL was generally aware of a video of one of its better known players viciously tuning up his girlfriend in a casino elevator as well as several domestic violence cases and your typical garden variety drug busts, DUIs and club fights. There was also the upcoming trial of star tight-end turned murderer.
And lest we forget, there was still a lot of discussion about the fairness of the NFL settlement with former players over concussions as well as what the NFL was doing to combat such injuries going forward.
This "story" has given the NFL headlines for what amounts to a silly controversy and it doesn't harm the brand one whit outside of, maybe, the people who have been dominating the threads about this topic. And the vast majority of you/us will continue to watch the NFL going forward regardless of whether Tom Brady did order a code red or his reputation tarnished despite him being innocent.
If anyone got played by this whole charade it is all of us.