The NFL knows all about penalizing athletes over seemingly-minor violations, from fining players who wear non-permissible colors or messages to fines over touchdown celebrations or sideline phone use to suspending those who missed drug tests while playing in different leagues, so it’s perhaps appropriate that they’re now getting run up on a technicality themselves. That would be submitting their Deflategate appeal with the wrong color cover:
NFL flagged for rules violation in #Deflategate appeal; filed brief with “wrong color cover” and ordered to refile. pic.twitter.com/ZLsuOfnCly
— Daniel Wallach (@WALLACHLEGAL) December 30, 2015
The league should be able to refile with the proper yellow cover without too much trouble, so this won’t make too much difference in terms of their actual case (which is arguing that Judge Berman overstepped his authority in September when he overturned Tom Brady’s league-mandated suspension), but it’s still quite funny to see. With all the NFL’s lawyers and paralegals working on this, they couldn’t be bothered to find an intern to go through the submission checklist and make sure the cover was correct? This led to plenty of jokes on Twitter, too, especially about the NFL’s claims that Brady had “general awareness” of a ball-deflation scheme, their consistent “integrity of the game” talk, and their byzantine catch rules:
More probable than not that someone didn't have general awareness of the right color for cover page of NFL appeal: https://t.co/THL6XAxwMJ
— Michael McCann (@McCannSportsLaw) December 30, 2015
NFL filing of wrong-color brief in deflategate not a competitive advantage, but may violate integrity of court rules pic.twitter.com/OkI2AEr1T2
— Daniel Wallach (@WALLACHLEGAL) December 30, 2015
https://twitter.com/mikewu43/status/682250006175285248
So, it may not hurt their case at all or cause them much inconvenience, but this is yet another opportunity for people to point and laugh at the NFL. Throughout the Deflategate scandal, those haven’t been few and far between.
[VICE]
