Although an announcement isn’t expected until next week, The New York Daily News‘s Gary Myers is reporting that Roger Goodell plans to suspend Tom Brady over Deflate-Gate.
According to Myers, the length of the suspension is still being hammered out (although he says any rumor over a season long suspension is “way off”) but the details of the Wells Report has apparently given Roger Goodell and the NFL more than enough reasons to act in this particular case.
The feeling is the Wells Report supplied Goodell with enough ammunition to suspend Brady both for breaking the rules by ordering the deflation of footballs and by not cooperating with the investigation when he refused to turn over his cell phone to Wells’ investigators.
The only question now is how many games with which Goodell will hit the league’s star player?
Myers also stressed that Brady “will not likely be the only one disciplined in DeflateGate” which seems to indicate that the Patriots aren’t going to get off freely even though the Wells Report found that no one outside of Tom Brady and a couple of Patriots’ employees knew anything about the deflation scheme.
Judging by the language in the Wells Report, there is little reason to think that the NFL won’t act. Despite Brady’s agent’s cries to the contrary, “more probable than not” is more than enough proof for the NFL to act and it certainly seems like they are gearing up to do so against the four-time Super Bowl winning quarterback.
Per Myers:
Wells’ constant use of “more probable than not” in explaining Brady’s role is the standard the NFL was looking for to find him in violation of the rules. The league considers that as good as guilty and just a way of phrasing it in legal terms.
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