SAN FRANCISCO — Deflategate has turned an otherwise sleepy owners meeting here this week into another must-see NFL event.
Roger Goodell and Patriots owner Robert Kraft will cross paths for the first time since their close friendship was apparently torched last week when the league slammed Tom Brady and New England with harsh penalties from the investigation into under-inflated footballs.
Brady has appealed his four-game suspension (an appeal Goodell will hear) for most likely knowing balls were being deflated for him and for not cooperating with Ted Wells’ probe, while Kraft has left open the nuclear option of suing the NFL for imposing a $1 million fine and docking the Patriots two high draft picks.
While weighing their options, the Patriots were engaged in talks with the league Monday night, ESPN reported, trying to resolve the situation without an appeal or litigation.
Though New England released a 20,000-word rant online last week claiming to poke holes in Wells’ report, Kraft had been silent until speaking with Sports Illustrated’s The MMQB site on Monday to say he felt the NFL had been not been “fair” to his franchise.
“This whole thing has been very disturbing,” Kraft said. “I just get really worked up. To receive the harshest penalty in league history is just not fair.
“If we’re giving all the power to the NFL and the office of the commissioner, this is something that can happen to all 32 teams.
“We need to have fair and balanced investigating and reporting. But in this report, every inference went against us. Inferences from ambiguous, circumstantial evidence all went against us. That’s the thing that really bothers me.
“[Do] they want to penalize us because there’s an aroma around this? That’s what this feels like. If you don’t have the so-called smoking gun, it really is frustrating. And they don’t have it. This thing never should have risen to this level.”
Kraft also is standing by the embattled Brady.
“Yes. Because we had the discussion—if you did it, let’s just deal with it and take our hit and move on,” Kraft told MMQB. “I’ve known Tommy 16 years, almost half his life. He’s a man, and he’s always been honest with me, and I trust him. I believed what he told me. He has never lied to me, and I have found no hard or conclusive evidence to the contrary.”
Kraft was cryptic when asked by King to describe his once-tight relationship with Goodell, which league sources said is close to beyond repair thanks to Deflategate.
“You’ll have to ask him,” Kraft responded.
The national media will get that chance over the next two days as the owners gather for a regularly scheduled meeting that until the Patriots’ penalties were announced last week was only expected to be known for a dramatic change to the extra-point process.
There are already signs Kraft — who sits or chairs five NFL committees and is one of the most powerful owners in the league — won’t be getting much support from his fellow owners in San Francisco.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said as soon as the penalties against the Patriots were announced that he supports Goodell and considers him fair, while Falcons owner Arthur Blank — another prominent and influential league insider — has repeatedly backed Goodell while criticizing the Patriots in the past week.
Blank, whose own franchise was penalized this offseason for pumping in crowd noise to the tune of a $350,000 fine, the loss of a draft pick and a committee suspension of team president Rich McKay, told The Associated Press the Patriots’ penalties were harsher because of their “deny, deny, deny” strategy.
“That seems to be the general feeling, that some of the frustration [with the Patriots] whether on an individual basis or organizational basis, was the failure to acknowledge,” Blank said.
As for the proposed PAT changes, three plans will be under consideration at the meetings this week with the strong belief that at least one will get enough owner support to be approved starting with the 2015 season.
One proposal calls for moving the line of scrimmage for the extra point to the 15-yard line, while the second does the same but would also let the defense return a turnover for two points. The third plan has the PAT from the 15, two points for a successful defensive return and moves the two-point try up a yard to the one-yard line.