Before last night, the last time Roger Goodell and Tom Brady were in the same building—as far as we know—was in a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan in August 2015, each seated and silent, flanked by attorneys.
Roger Goodell has gone to playoff games in Seattle, Atlanta, and Kansas City this season. The two conference championship games before the Super Bowl will be Packers-Falcons in Atlanta and Steelers-Patriots in Foxboro. The NFL commissioner will choose the option which allows him to be booed and berated less.
Tom Brady’s last option to overturn his four-game suspension was to try and take the case to the Supreme Court, but instead, he’s ending his battle against the NFL. After having his latest appeal rejected Wednesday, the Patriots quarterback said today that he will not continue to fight his punishment for his role in …
The ongoing legal battle between Roger Goodell and Tom Brady over the latter’s Ballghazi suspension took one more step toward a merciful end today.
Any Given Wednesday, Bill Simmons’ new weekly sports talk show, debuted this evening on HBO. It was ... exactly what you’d expect. It opened with a segment on the NBA Finals and LeBron’s greatness (featuring a Teen Wolf comparison less than two minutes in) before Charles Barkley joined the show to lay down his takes…
In the year 2184, when Tom Brady’s head is thawed from cryostasis to testify against Robo-Goodell in Moon Court, your descendants may wonder how the longest-running legal battle in the history of sports ever got started. (Their neural visit to the electro-sapio-repository will tell them it was about balls and text…
A federal appeals court reversed Judge Richard Berman’s decision today and reinstated the NFL’s four-game suspension for Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for his part in the team’s football-deflating scandal.
It is a pleasant surprise that this lawsuit, filed today by New England Patriots fans against the NFL, is not scrawled in crayon on the back of a Papa Gino’s placemat, or smeared in shit on the wall of a truck-stop bathroom. But then you read it, and it might as well be: it accuses the NFL, in punishing the Patriots…
Though neither Roger Goodell nor Tom Brady appeared in the courtroom, today might’ve been the single most important day in this whole Ballghazi mess: the NFL and NFLPA made their cases in front of a three-judge panel that will decide, once and for all (barring one more appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will…
Almost exactly a year to the day after Patriots equipment personnel “likely” intentionally deflated footballs to make them easier for Tom Brady to grip—at least, that’s according to the NFL’s Wells Report—there was another incident involving footballs and gauges before a Patriots playoff game at Gillette Stadium.
Ballghazi isn’t over, but both the NFL and Tom Brady would like it to be as soon as possible—or, more specifically, to be resolved before the start of the 2016 season. A federal appeals court has granted a request by both sides to expedite the appeal hearing, and the timing could turn out to be fun, with Goodell and…
As you knew it would, South Park took on Ballghazi in tonight’s 19th season premiere. Cartman sums up the eight months spent investigating, millions of dollars, and god knows how many hours talking about whether Tom Brady ordered a small amount of air be removed from footballs in an appropriately sophomoric dream…
The federal judge who oversaw the Ballghazi case, vacating Tom Brady’s four-game suspension while legally shredding whatever integrity was left of the NFL’s arbitration apparatus, entered more letters from the public into the case’s docket yesterday. This batch is smaller, not quite a dozen letters, and includes a few…
Miss Georgia Betty Cantrell is your new Miss America, and she won the title shortly after responding to a Tom Brady ball-deflation question with: “If there was question there, then yes, I think he cheated.”
On Tuesday, ESPN Boston’s Mike Reiss responded to the big ESPN story tying Ballghazi to Spygate with seven bullet points, highlighting items from the story worth noting and criticizing others that Reiss believes don’t stand up. At some point, ESPN.com editors chopped it down to five bullet points.
It’s one thing to yell and scream on the Internet; it’s another to take the time to address, stamp, and mail your anger to a federal judge. But that’s exactly what 21 people did to Judge Richard Berman, who presided over the brouhaha between the NFL and the player’s union regarding Tom Brady’s suspension and how much…
With trumped up charges and a whole lot of dodgy PSI data, the only somewhat-weighty evidence that the Patriots had a concerted ball-deflation scheme going was the text-message comedy stylings of locker-room attendant Jim “The Deflator” McNally and equipment assistant John “Dorito Dink” Jastremski. The two were…
In ESPN’s motherlode about the Patriots’ hilarious history of cheating over the last decade and a half, you’ll notice a mysterious character at the heart of the videotaping operation: “football research director” Ernie Adams. To close observers of the Patriots organization, Adams has been a matter of curiosity for…
I want to hug and kiss this beautiful story from ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham and take it out to a fancy dinner. Splendidly reported and brutally damning of both the New England Patriots and Roger Goodell, it alleges that the Patriots’ Spygate scandal was worse than anyone imagined—and was actively…
Tom Brady Sr. called a San Francisco radio program Friday afternoon to defend his son, angrily declaring the show’s host “full of crap” and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a “flaming liar.”
