Robert Kraft asks Roger Goodell for deflate-gate draft pick back

There were a ton of bad decisions through the deflate-gate debacle, but ranking somewhere near the top is New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft accepting the NFL's punishment for his team.

For an organization that claimed innocence, it made no sense. The penalty for perhaps deflating footballs in the AFC championship game two seasons ago was fairly unbelievable — a $1 million fine, and the loss of a first-round draft pick in 2016 and a fourth-round pick in 2017 — considering the alleged crime wasn't that big of a deal in the first place, and Ted Wells' investigating report on the matter was light on any evidence.

But Kraft suddenly accepted the punishment, and now he humorously wants the first-round draft pick back. Doug Kyed of NESN reported that Kraft said he wrote NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a letter trying to get the team's selection back.

Good luck with that one.

 

Here's what Kraft said, according to ESPN's Mike Reiss:

"I personally wrote a letter to the commissioner responding to his comment that if any new facts came up, he would take them into consideration. I personally believe that when the league made their decision, they did not factor in the Ideal Gas Law. They admitted that publicly. They had a full year of being able to observe Tom Brady play with all the rules of whatever the NFL was, and make any judgments there. We have laid it out pretty straightforward and now it's up to them to decide."

The chances of the NFL voluntarily giving back the Patriots' pick back are about the same as Michigan State being let back in the NCAA tournament because folks at the NCAA feel bad the Spartans lost in the first round. You have a better chance winning Powerball this week because even a billion-to-one chance is better than no chance at all, and that's what Kraft has for his request. Although Tom Brady won his legal appeal of his equally dumb four-game suspension in deflate-gate, that means nothing for the Patriots' penalties. The NFL has never admitted that its investigation was overdone and the results of it proved nothing. Giving the Patriots their pick back would be telling the world the whole Wells investigation was a joke and the league screwed the whole ordeal up, and it's not doing that. Once Kraft rolled over, it was done.

It's still amazing Kraft did so. He got no benefit out of it. It seemed at the time like maybe he was doing so because there was an agreement, at least implicitly, that Brady would get easier treatment if Kraft gave up on the team's punishment. That obviously didn't happen.

So the Patriots and their fans can complain that the punishment was unjust, and they're right. It was excessive and based on almost nothing. But Kraft accepted it. And Kraft could rewrite "Ulysses" to Goodell and it's not moving the needle there. Goodell would look weak if he gave back any draft picks, because there's no reason for him to do so.

The NFL's basic position on deflate-gate has never changed. It lost in federal court on the Brady part of the matter, and it's in the middle of appealing that.

So if you've spent time arguing that the NFL should give back the Patriots' draft picks, you're wasting your time. Kraft is too with his letter-writing campaign. He made a startling error in judgment, and now the Patriots have to live with it.