The full-season suspension of Saints coach Sean Payton in 2012 suggests that Patriots coach Bill Belichick should have been disciplined in some way for his role in #DeflateGate. Based on the justification of Payton’s punishment, either Belichick knew about the scheme and should have stopped it or he didn’t know, should have known, and should have stopped it.
So why was Payton punished and Belichick wasn’t? The right answer perhaps isn’t that Belichick should be punished, too. The right answer perhaps is that Payton shouldn’t have been punished, either.
Belichick was exonerated via a lengthy, multi-million-dollar investigation that generated a 243-page report. If a similar effort had been undertaken by the NFL in 2012, with Ted Wells or someone else from the outside hired to interview dozens of people and to examine text messages and emails, Payton’s lack of knowledge of the bounty program implemented by defensive coordinator Gregg Williams could have been established, and the final punishment imposed against the Saints could have been carved out in a way that it left out Payton.
But Payton didn’t have the benefit of a full-blown, external investigation. Instead, the league office supplemented it’s judge-jury-executioner role with police-prosecutor powers.
On the back end, Payton had no meaningful appeal rights to pursue, because he’s not in a union. If he could have forced Commissioner Roger Goodell to delegate, as the players did, the appeal powers to an outside entity like former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the same reasoning that resulted in the discipline imposed on the Saints players being overturned may have applied to Payton -- even if the evidence suggested Payton knew about the bounty program and tried to conceal it.
"[W]hen an effort to change a culture rests heavily on prohibitions, and discipline and sanctions that are seen as selective, ad hoc or inconsistent, then people in all industries are prone to react negatively — whether they be construction workers, police officers or football players,” Tagliabue wrote. “They will push back and challenge the discipline as unwarranted. As reflected in the record in the present appeals, they will deny, hide behind a code of silence, destroy evidence and obstruct. In other words, rightly or wrongly, a sharp change in sanctions or discipline can often be seen as arbitrary and as an impediment rather than an instrument of change. This is what we see on the record here.”
In other words, Tagliabue believes that a problem arising from the current culture of the NFL shouldn’t be changed by swooping in, catching one team red-handed, imposing heavy sanctions, and then hoping that the punishment will scare the rest of the league straight. In this case, an obvious culture existed of preparing footballs to a quarterback’s liking and (as I’ll explain later tonight in a separate item) an obvious culture of something less than precision and zeal existed regarding the NFL’s attention to whether the air pressure in the footballs complied with the mandatory limit of 12.5 to 13.5 PSI.
That’s why, even with evidence of lack of candor and refusal to fully cooperate (i.e., “they will deny, hide behind a code of silence, destroy evidence and obstruct”), the decision to strictly and suddenly apply a rule that had been loosely applied and never policed seems to be heavy handed and unfair.
This latests effort to dramatically and suddenly change one narrow aspect of existing NFL culture by nailing one team and scaring the rest into compliance didn’t ensnare Belichick. In 2012, an effort to dramatically and suddenly change one narrow aspect of existing NFL culture also shouldn’t have ensnared Payton.