Tom Brady will survive this just fine. Football players always reach the other side of on-field scandal differently than other athletes do.
Paul Hornung and Alex Karras were caught red-handed gambling on the NFL. If they’d been baseball players, their very existences would’ve been erased, like failed generals from Soviet-era history books. The commissioner would have legally replaced the vowels in their names with asterisks. And the notion Hornung would walk in through the Hall of Fame’s front door and Karras would spend a few years as one of the sport’s most recognizable broadcasters, well …
No, when the time comes, Brady will be elected to the Hall, and his induction speech will include not even a syllable of remorse or regret, and nobody will care. In years to come, his accomplishments won’t be rendered contaminated, because however badly he may have acted in covering up Deflategate (at worst) and failing to cooperate (at least), there isn’t a football fan with a working set of eyes who believes his career and his successes are merely the product of PSI.
Bill Belichick will skate into history, too. If he’s already shown a lack of patience with those who would ask if the Patriots’ first three titles were helped along by sabotage and counter-intelligence, and if his fourth is now destined to be deflated to a degree, he remains unchallenged as his generation’s greatest coach.
But Belichick is unloved and mostly unliked by most football fans outside New England; nobody believes (with any measure of reason) he is a product of espionage. They just don’t. He’ll be in Canton someday, too.
No, the man who will pay the steepest price is Robert Kraft. It isn’t easy for an owner to achieve immortality anyway, especially if you aren’t a league founder. But not long ago, it seemed Kraft was on a gold-spackled road there. Before his Patriots won their third championship in February 2005, I asked a league executive about Kraft.
“The perfect owner,” came the reply. “Unquestioned integrity. First class in every way. Treats everyone who works for him like gold. Treats his competitors in the league with dignity. Maybe the most trusted man in sports. I know guys who say they’d spend a year working for free under him just to learn how to do things the right way in this league.”
That wasn’t a lonely voice, either. That was Kraft. That was the Pats. That was the thing: You could hate on the coach, you could mock the quarterback, you could let the steam blow from your ears at how successful the Pats had become. But that was all. At the end of the day, it was like complaining about the sun: Like it or not, it was still returning tomorrow.
Now? There is only one man to whom every Patriots faux pas will stick and provide a forever stink. We know now Belichick was allowed to run free like Maxwell Smart. We know now, at the very least, Brady wasn’t compelled to cooperate. And we know who oversaw all of this, allowed it all to happen.
It was a terrible optic when Roger Goodell attended a dinner party at Kraft’s house on the eve of the AFC Championship Game, dueling studies in hubris. It was equally revealing when Kraft ranted Super Bowl week about how unfairly his team had been treated.
“I believe unconditionally that the New England Patriots have done nothing wrong,” Kraft raged that night. “I would hope the NFL would apologize.”
Four months later, we now know that Kraft was either a) stunningly arrogant; b) utterly misled or c) entirely unconcerned with the subterfuge that has operated on his watch for years. None of those choices reflects well on Kraft, who has gone from model boss to boss enabler in 10 short years.
And whose own reputation now lies in tatters. Maybe forever.