A Scandal About Nothing
By 
That’s our Ballghazi. The refusal to cooperate charges are as weak as the evidence on the underlying offense.
Jeb is excellent on the crucial point that you can’t justify a massively disproportionate punishment when nobody thought the offense was important ex ante, and they were obviously right the first time:
It should never have gotten this far anyway. On the basic competitive level, it’s absurd that the NFL mandates testing footballs for air pressure before games, then returns them to individual teams, rather than keeping the tested, allowable game balls in a hopper controlled only by the officials. Even the game’s outcome undermined a lot of shrieking about violated purity. After the Patriots’ under-inflated footballs were replaced during halftime of the AFC Championship game, they racked up a further 28 points while shutting out the Colts. Brady went on to set the Super Bowl record for most pass completions in a game, using properly inflated balls against the NFL’s top-ranked defense. All this should have suggested handing down fines in accordance with existing ball-tampering penalties and changing the ball-handling protocols, but that would not have suggested that Brady and the Patriots’ biggest crime was shattering the delusive purity of the inerrant absolutism of Goodell World.
Crucial to the process of over-blowing this triviality was the erroneous report leaked to and then by Chris Mortensen, who still thinks he did nothing wrong by printing falsehoods that were essential in establishing a narrative that would lead to lost first round draft picks and a 4-game suspension for the team’s most important player for an offense that merited a warning and perhaps a modest fine. (Oh, and those fumbling stats Goodell’s lickspittles bring up as evidence that Ballghazi really was a big deal? They’re such consummate junk they’re probably being cited in a Texas death penalty case by an expert witness right now.)
If you see in all this problems similar to those in in the political media, you’re right! As you could have guessed, Maureen Dowd compared the Tom Brady faux-scandal to the latest Hillary Clinton faux scandal. It’s in fact a good analogy, even though the point it proves is the opposite of the point America’s least necessary columnist thinks she’s making.