When a football team plunges to 0-5, the team considers making significant changes. With the league office plunging to 0-5 in high-profile player disciplinary cases, it could be time to consider making significant changes.
Peter King of TheMMQ.com has a quote from an unnamed team executive in his Monday column that confirms the mindset percolating in multiple corners of the league: “We need to find out if we have the right people giving us our legal advice.”
For a league that has (had) a track record of winning big cases, the sudden inability to find its way around a courtroom is stunning, and the latest loss to the NFL Players Association and Tom Brady becomes the most glaring. And also the most dangerous for the people who get paid by the hour, or by the salary, to give legal advice to the NFL.
The league office rarely fires anyone in a prominent job with the harsh immediacy that teams do, but a perfect storm of factors has aligned for the league’s in-house and outside lawyers. In the statement issued after Brady’s suspension was vacated, Patriots owner Robert Kraft made it clear that his beef is not with Commissioner Roger Goodell but with those whispering legal advice into this ear.
“[W]ith absolutely no evidence of any actions of wrongdoing by Tom in the Wells report, the lawyers at the league still insisted on imposing and defending unwarranted and unprecedented discipline,” Kraft said.
That was widely perceived to be a shot at NFL general counsel Jeff Pash and outside counsel Gregg Levy, a finalist for the Commissioner job in 2006 who served as Goodell’s legal advisor during the Brady appeal hearing. And while some may shrug at Kraft’s criticism because his team was the target of the most recent investigation/prosecution, plenty of voices throughout the league have quietly joined the chorus that change may be needed when it comes to the legal advice the league is getting.
Coupled with the arrival of Tod Leiweke as Chief Operating Officer followed closely by the departure of P.R. chief Paul Hicks, it’s not hard to envision other high-level officials leaving in a way that looks voluntary, but that really isn’t.
The most obvious change should be (and undoubtedly will be) the end of Ted Wells’ run as an “independent” investigator. Even if, as some believe, Wells was simply skewing his investigation to give the person who hired Wells what the person who hired Wells wanted, Wells becomes the most obvious person to blame internally — and the easiest to separate from. He doesn’t need to be fired; he simply needs to not be hired for any future high-profile investigation/prosecutions.
Of course, the Brady case isn’t over yet. If Pash and/or Levy can snatch victory at the appeals court from the jaws of the defeat delivered last week by Judge Richard M. Berman, that 0-5 record becomes 1-4. But that may not be enough to prevent change, especially since the NFL may now be tempted to pursue the appeal with a new set of lawyers.
There’s also a chance that, in the echo chamber at 345 Park Avenue, the lawyers are simply telling Roger what Roger wants to hear because Roger has made it clear that if those lawyers won’t tell Roger what he wants to hear, Roger will get new lawyers. That’s a very common dynamic when it comes to lawyers advising organizations led ultimately by one executive, and I’ve been in multiple awkward meetings where, for example, the person in charge of a manufacturing facility doesn’t like what the lawyer is saying because it keeps the person in charge of the manufacturing facility from running it the way he wants.
Regardless of whether it came from the Commissioner or the lawyers, something apparently changed in 2012.
“It’s like some switch got flipped in the league office where they said, ‘Okay, let’s see how far we can push this and basically impose penalties wherever we want to without any process and let’s see what happens,'” NFLPA outside counsel Kessler said on Friday’s PFT Live.
What’s happened is that the NFL has pushed the envelope and failed, repeatedly. The Saints bounty suspensions were overturned by former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who was appointed to handle the appeal under pressure from litigation challenging Goodell’s ability to preside. The Ray Rice indefinite suspension was overturned by a retired federal judge appointed by the league to handle the case. The Adrian Peterson suspension was vacated by a federal judge in Minnesota. The Greg Hardy suspension was reduced from 10 games to four by the league’s hand-picked, go-to arbitrator, Harold Henderson.
Now, Brady fought the NFL law, and the NFL law lost. Whether a product of bad advice given or good advice ignored, the league and its new COO likely realize that whatever changed three years ago needs to change back.