Tom Brady and the very interesting 1st round this year...

Suspended four games?!  That takes Tom Brady off my board for the 1st round.  I don't care how good he is.  1/4 of the season a goose egg?  Count me out.  Should be interesting how this affects the draft in the 1st round.  I see it like this...

Best Available(Not taking in account team needs)

1) Aaron Rodgers
2) Peyton Manning
3) Drew Brees
4) Phillip Rivers
5) Tony Romo
6) Jamaal Charles
7) Arian Foster
Kansas City Defense
9) Rob Gronkowski
10) Antonio Bryant


Honorable Mention:

Dez Bryant
Matthew Stafford(still think he sucks though)
Frank Gore

Who knows if some of these guys will still be there when the draft begins.  But his is how I see it right now.  I'm sure there will be a couple defenses that could garner some interest.

Rivers and Romo sound pretty good to me

I'd be shocked if it's four games in the end. Almost every NFL player suspension gets reduced on appeal, and in this case they have no actual evidence beyond common sense that Brady was involved. If they don't reduce the suspension on appeal and it goes before a judge I would guess it gets thrown out altogether.

I think if the draft was tomorrow I'd still take Brady #2.

i will guarantee you this. if he gets at least two games after the appeal, i won't be taking him.

Brady is guilty somehow of something in this whole thing. Though I don't think any of that was proven.  
I want to know how the nfl is not getting more attention for allowing the 1st half of the afc championship game to be played with balls that we not at the correct psi. The league says they had reason to believe that the patriots had deflated balls before.  Instead of checking the balls and keeping them safe/watched the league wanted to "catch" the patriots more then have the game be played on a level playing field.  The colts got screwed the most in this whole thing. The league had a chance to check the balls again once the game started and they choose to wait till halftime. The league is saying that catching a team cheating is more important then having a game to decide who goes to the super bowl be fair for both teams.  
I repeat that Brady " probably " ( nfl term for guilty ) had something to do with this and should be punished.  But the league looks worse then ever and has no credibility towards anything anymore. Knowingly allowing the 1st half of the afc championship to be played with under inflated balls is disgusting and the nfl is who sacrificed the integrity of the game the most.

The NFL has taken 12 months straight of bad press. You've got Ray Rice and the rest of the police blotter. You've got the Cowboys collecting felons this offseason. You've got concussions and head trauma hanging over everything. You've got an owner in Cleveland who committed millions of dollars in fraud. And we are not far removed from a story that combines all the worst stories (the guy in Cleveland who probably had long term head trauma murders his girlfriend and kills himself). On top of that we have constant rich guy fights as the millionaires fight with the billionaires over how to divide the money.

And the "deflate gate" punishment story in the dead of the offseason is 10Xs bigger than the ongoing playoffs of the NBA and NHL combined.

I am not sure there are many addicts more addicted to drugs than Americans are addicted to football.

But I realize today that there are many other things that I could spend my time addicted too. Steroids ran me away baseball, a dictatorship is chasing me away from pro football. are there college football fantasy leagues anywhere?

Goodell's days are numbered.

But I do think this whole thing has been blown way way way out of proportion.  They won the damn game by 38 points!  I mean, I understand people hate the Pats.  But they were just better than everyone last year.  This is a misdemeanor at best breaking the rules wise.  It's on the level of a stealing the signs in a baseball game or using too much pine tar ala George Brett.  A better example might be in basketball when two people go for the ball and it goes out of bounds.  Both point at each other, claiming the other knocked it out.  One of them might know damn good and well they knocked it out.  Ask yourself the last time you saw a player say "no man, I know you couldn't see it, but I knocked it out."  Never.  ESPN needs something else to cover.  Nothing to see here.

The best thing in that article is that the ball boys are responsible for the balls and they are allowed to carry hand held heaters to heat the balls, but they are not allowed to use sideline heaters. Just like the QBs can scuff up the game balls (because Brady and Manning lobbied a few years back), but they can't deflate them.

If you didn't want the balls messed with, you'd just put the balls in a box and don't let anyone touch them until game time. But the NFL wants points and offense so they allow this to happen. At least until ESPN writes a story and fans get angry, then they decide to give the worst punishment in league history.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/12881342/poll-shows-fans-support-nfl-sanctions-tom-brady

Classic article.  ESPN (which I am pretty sure is a subsidiary of the NFL) has conducted a poll that shows %63 of fans think Brady and the Pats deserved their punishment.  Interestingly, only %54 of the same fans believe Brady and the Patriots cheated.  This means almost %10 of the football fans polled think the Patriots are innocent and should still be punished.

Somehow ESPN takes their unofficial poll where almost %10 of people wanted punishment for a team they don't think is guilty, and the headline is "Fan Poll Supports NFL."

So what you're saying is ESPN has morphed into some sports version of Fox "News"

I think Barrett was saying they had morphed into CNN, MSNBC, FOX news...and every other outlet that simply pushes whatever agenda they have. We are such a funny society...we point at Pravda, Izvestia, and Trud - and wonder how the Soviet state could get away with such one sided propaganda...and then our country eats up news (from the most important to the most trivial) like hungry guppies.

This is why fantasy football is so appealing - it allows us to be in control of our own group and put out our own truth in a setting that we can laugh at and embellish without too much angst...a little angst is okay.

Join or Die...my team name is from one of the great propaganda machines in our history -

And Graham - if you are going to look into college football - buy low on the Tennessee Vols this year before the stock goes through the roof