NFL Declares Open Season on Team Execs with Textgate and Noisegate Punishments

The Cleveland Browns have finally been punished for Textgate, with the team being fined $250,000 and general manager Ray Farmer being suspended for the first four games of the upcoming season. Go ahead. Make your Ray Farmer jokes now. Get them out of the way.

Q: How do you know Ray Farmer was suspended?

A: The team makes fewer dumb decisions.      

The Atlanta Falcons pumped in fake crowd noise to their stadium. (I blame Matt Ryan. Don't I always blame Matt Ryan?) The Falcons were 10th in the NFL in attendance last season, so why they needed to do this in the first place is just, well, dumb. But they did, and so they, too, were punished: fined $350,000, docked a 2016 fifth-round pick and team president Rich McKay will be suspended for at least three months from the Competition Committee starting April 1.

Anyone who knows McKay understands he sees the Competition Committee as a prestigious post, like the Secretary of State.

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

The reaction on social media was predictable. Light punishment. The Browns got a slap on the wrist. The NFL pumped in a fake slap on the wrist for the Falcons.

If you think that, you truly do not understand how the NFL works.

What the NFL did here was send a signal to all teams. No, it's not a perfect signal. Maybe it is true that $350,000 to an NFL team is the equivalent of a cup of coffee to you and me. But ruthless rich dudes do not get ruthlessly rich by just handing over $350,000. That's like, you know, gas for their yachts.

But back to the NFL's message. It's not so much the amount of money as it is the punishment and removal of those responsible. The NFL held team executives responsible the way it does players. Or mostly did. This is a good thing.

To me, and definitely to players, this type of sanction has previously been missing from the NFL's disciplinary holster. Individual players have long been held responsible for their misdeeds. They get punished for all kinds of wrongdoings. But the owners and league execs…not so much.

While the league always talked about punishment being equal, it hasn't been. Owners like Jimmy Haslam somehow escape NFL punishment. Haslam paid a $92 million fine for alleged fraud, and the NFL did nothing. If a player had done something like that, players have told me repeatedly, they would have been punished severely.

David Richard/Associated Press/Associated Press

The discipline of Atlanta and Cleveland shows that league executives themselves are being held accountable. I'm not saying it's never happened before. It has. But to have it announced on the same day that a GM and a longtime team executive in McKay—one of the most respected and best-liked team executives in football—are being punished in one case with a four-game suspension and in the other with indefinite banishment…it does mean something.

It's also not insignificant that a former player in Troy Vincent, now the NFL's executive vice president of football operations, instituted these punishments.

Rob Carr/Getty Images

To people saying the punishments weren't stiff, not sure what you wanted the NFL to do. Chop off limbs?

Crowd noise and texting aren't major felonies, and still, there were picks and cash taken.

To see the difference in this discipline and past ones, look no further than the Washington and Dallas salary-cap punishments several years ago. The NFL determined that the Cowboys and Washington dumped salaries in 2010—when the NFL was operating without a salary cap due to the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement. Both teams did that to gain an unfair advantage when the cap returned. The Cowboys were penalized $10 million in cap space, and Washington $36 million. 

That instance of cheating was far worse than anything Atlanta and Cleveland did, yet the NFL didn't single out a front-office individual or owner to punish. The teams were punished. Clearly some individual or individuals made the decision to cheat, but the NFL looked the other way.

I think when it comes to front-office types, the NFL is no longer going to give them preferential treatment. It's open season on management.

Again, to be clear, it's not that management types have never been punished before, but this is a fairly remarkable sight, when two are in the same day.  

Another criticism of the NFL's punishment, particularly when it comes to the Browns: The punishment of Farmer was done after he completed the bulk of his free-agent and draft work (the same could be said for McKay). There's some legitimacy to that.

One former NFL team executive told me, "I don't believe the discipline is inappropriate, but the timing is, shall we say, convenient. After all, the timing of Ray's suspension is that it allows him to work through a critical period for a person in his position. In fact, this is the case with Rich, too. So should a player suspension be deferred until after the time most critical to his position (the season)? 'Hey, you're suspended, but not until OTAs and mini camps.'"

Again, smart point. It's also true that general managers do have other duties. They are general managers because they handle every aspect of a team's functionality. Sure, you may say Farmer isn't good at his job, but him being gone four games will cause disruption. The Browns will survive, of course, but the reason Farmer was hired was ostensibly to have his smarts impact the organization as a whole, not just in pieces, even if those are significant.

And again, look at the crime. These are not high crimes.

"I also don't believe the financial penalties are soft," the executive said. "A quarter of a million dollars, over a third of a million dollars—that's a significant amount of money in an absolute sense."

The legitimate criticism in the case of the Browns is that almost no one in the NFL believes Farmer texted the sideline on his own accord. Almost everyone I speak to believes Haslam was the impetus. The NFL, however, probably couldn't prove that. There's a sense around football that Farmer fell on his sword for his owner.

There's something else at play here. The way individual executives were punished might be foretelling for any possible Deflategate punishment.

Steven Senne/Associated Press

The NFL punished Bill Belichick for Spygate and since Belichick is basically the chief football officer, they might go after him again. They could say, as they did with McKay, that if he didn't know footballs were being deflated, he should have known.

We should know in that case by 2025 or so, as the NFL continues to take its sweet ass time.

In the meantime, the NFL has ruled on Noisegate and Textgate. There's a definite method to their punishments, and there's one more Gate to go.

Mike Freeman covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.