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Tom Brady and the fatal flaw of hubris

Tom Brady has lost home-field advantage.

The NFL Players Association had sought to have a union-friendly Minnesota court hear its suit against the NFL over its four-game suspension of Brady. But Judge Richard H. Kyle said, Not so fast. Where’s the jurisdiction?

Uh, precisely. Deflategate took place in Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. The NFL is headquartered in Manhattan and the union, in Washington D.C. This is an I-95 corridor issue.

As it was, the judge kicked it back to New York where the NFL filed its own suit to validate commish Roger Goodell’s right to suspend Brady. So the NFLPA lost whatever chance it had to have its case for an injunction heard in a receptive venue. The thinking was that Adrian Peterson’s case – he was suspended for taking a switch to his 4-year-old – was overturned in Minnesota. So why not go there? But Peterson plays for the – pause for effect – Minnesota Vikings. And anyway, his case turned not on his being disciplined by the NFL but on his being disciplined twice for the same thing ...

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Tom Brady – the NFL’s Nixon?

From the standpoint of stupid, it’s hard to beat Deflategate. It’s a writer’s dream, a story that keeps getting more and more bizarro.

NFL commish Roger Goodell – hardly the paragon of Alexandrian leadership – has nonetheless grown a spine and upheld his four-game ban of New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, which followed an NFL-commissioned report concluding Brady probably knew that two Pats’ employees had deflated the team’s footballs before the A.F.C. Championship game with the Indianapolis Colts. ...

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