He also had the 6th worst vertical leap, at 24.5 inches.
With this performance, it is not surprising that Brady was the 199th player, and the 7th quarterback, chosen in the 2000 NFL draft. But in the years that followed, Brady surprised everyone, especially those teams that passed on taking him in the draft that year. The six quarterbacks selected ahead of Brady collectively started 191 games in their NFL careers, a total that Brady surpassed in 2014. The skinny, slow kid from Michigan outperformed them all. In fact, he has outperformed almost every quarterback who has ever played the game.
There could not be a better example than Brady to illustrate that achieving a competitive edge in sport is about much more than physical appearance or even the analytical quantification of athleticism in raw numbers. Attaining that edge, whether you are Tom Brady or the New England Patriots, requires a sometimes-mysterious combination of skill and luck. Cracking that code, or just being the right person in the right place at the right time, can lead to on-the-field glory and off-the-field rewards.
Tom Brady cracked that code. Today, Brady has a reported net worth of more than $130 million. He is married to a Brazilian supermodel. A postfootball career in politics—which Brady has hinted at every so often—seems possible. Brady’s opulent lifestyle and fame provide an easy answer to the question of why athletes seek to achieve a competitive edge. Sure, winning and basking in its glory are great. But the winnings are found not only on the field.
In the 2015 Super Bowl, the Patriots pulled off an improbable, last-minute victory over the Seattle Seahawks (whose coach decided—in what many people thought a moment of madness or hubris—to throw the ball rather than run it, even though the ball sat a mere thirty-six inches from the Patriot’s goal line). Another chapter was added to Brady’s storybook career. But then the entire fairy tale appeared to be threatened by a most bizarre turn of events.
Tom Brady playing for the New England Patriots in 2009.
It turned out that less than two weeks before the Super Bowl, an equipment manager for the Indianapolis Colts—whom the Patriots had beaten in the American Football Conference (AFC) championship game to get to the Super Bowl—had contacted the NFL with concerns that the balls used by the Patriots had been intentionally underinflated. In the NFL, each team provides the game balls that it uses when on offense, and the equipment manager suspected that the Patriots were using nonconforming balls to gain a competitive advantage. The Patriots were accused of preparing the footballs that they were using in a way that would make the balls easier to throw, catch, and grip. Specifically, the Patriots were charged with letting some air out of each ball, thereby making them a bit softer and easier to handle on a cold, rainy New England winter day.
The combustible mix of America’s most popular sport, one of its most high-profile teams, and its wildly successful and photogenic quarterback at the center of the controversy ignited into what came to be called “Deflategate.” The controversy led the NFL to investigate, which resulted in a 243-page report that suggested some sort of cheating by Brady and the Patriots. The NFL responded to the findings of its report by suspending Brady for four games.
Deflategate blows up. New York Daily News, May 7, 2015.
But that was far from the end of the story. It was actually just the beginning. Brady challenged the suspension, which the NFL subsequently upheld. Then the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) took the NFL to court. The dispute thus moved from an internal NFL disciplinary proceeding to a legal action under US law. All this over allegedly deflated footballs used in a game.
In court, the NFLPA accused the NFL of failing to play by the rules of its own disciplinary proceedings through a lack of independence in its investigation, misrepresentation of evidence, and errors in its analysis that called into question the NFL’s findings. The science of ball pressurization underlying the NFL’s report on the alleged deflated footballs was challenged, and competing hired experts aired their different views. A cottage industry of analysts found a home on the Internet, and included everyone from skilled technical experts to far-out conspiracy theorists. The issue became characterized as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s rush to judgment versus Brady’s alleged cheating. Just before the next season began in September 2015, the court vacated the NFL suspension, freeing Brady to play, but the cloud over Brady lingered. The issued dragged on, and in the spring of 2016 a court reinstated Brady’s suspension, withholding judgments on the merits of the dispute but supporting Goodell’s disciplinary authority.
Tom Brady and the Patriots may indeed have been guilty of violating the rules in search of an advantage—consider that one of their equipment men was nicknamed “the Deflator.”e However, what is unambiguous is that the NFL, in its procedural missteps in conducting its investigation and meting out punishment, failed in its basic duty to fairly enforce the rules of the game that it oversees. Writing for Yahoo Sports, Dan Wetzel summed up the controversy, explaining that the NFL’s missteps helped the controversy evolve to become about much more than simply underinflated footballs: “How does anyone in the NFL—owner, coach, player, or fan—possibly trust the league office to investigate and rule on anything ever again?”12
All is fair in love and war, but not in sport. Sport is based on rules. Without rules, there can be no sport. Without trust in the enforcement of rules, the rules risk becoming meaningless, or worse, the rules actually contribute to a diminishment of the integrity of sport.
Whatever may have happened with those footballs, the violation itself doesn’t threaten the integrity of sport. But if the NFL fails to uphold the rules of the game or the rules that it has in place for investigations and punishments, then the integrity of the game itself may be threatened.
When the organization in charge of establishing and enforcing the rules fails to do its job, the spirit of sport is threatened. We may never know the truth behind Deflategate. But the NFL rules that governed equipment for football games set the stage for the Deflategate, and the NFL did professional football no favors in how it responded to the claims of the Patriots’ subterfuge. As the entities responsible for coming up with the rules governing the preparation of footballs, the NFL and NFLPA share the ultimate responsibility for the lingering controversy. The NFL rules allowed each team to prepare its own footballs, for use when on offense, with very little in the way of oversight or accountability. That created an opportunity for mischief while denying the NFL the ability to enforce these rules when a situation like Deflategate arose.
It need not have been so. Had the NFL had in place better procedures for overseeing how footballs are prepared by each team—basic accountability—Deflategate might never have occurred. And if allegations were raised about rule breaking, greater transparency about the handling of the footballs would have rendered moot future scientific debates in courtrooms about the application of the Ideal Gas Law to the behavior of wet footballs.
Reactions to the Deflategate controversy help characterize two commonplace positions when it comes to enforcing rules in sport.
One is that rules are meant to be broken, and if you get caught, too bad for you. NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana expressed this view when he said that even if the Patriots altered balls for advantage, Deflategate was not a big deal:
It is one of those things that is a rule, right? It might be a dumb rule, but it doesn’t matter. [Brady] didn’t deflate them himself, but you can pick up the ball and can tell if it is underinflated, overinflated, or what you like. Everybody is afraid to say it, but if the guy did it, so what. Just pay up and move on. It’s no big deal. . . . Our offensive linemen used to spray silicone on their shirts until they got caught. Once you get caught, you get caught. Period. It doesn’t take anything away from Tom’s game.13
Players, Montana tells us, go right up to and sometimes over the edge, and if they do, they sometimes get caught. Big whoop. If you are caught you are penalized. That is what rules are for,