Deflategate to Shady Dealings: NFL Scandals Are Becoming Mostly Hot Air

It was another tough week for the NFL. Deflategate has once again buried the Patriots and the sanctity of the Super Bowl under layers of suspicion and childish "Tom Brady's balls" double entendres. The Seahawks drafted Frank Clark, who was arrested and initially charged with domestic violence in November, after what appeared to be a cursory background check. LeSean McCoy accused Chip Kelly of trading away all of the "good black players" on the Eagles.     

Cheating, domestic violence and racism. A scandal trifecta. It's my job to put this week into perspective, to tell you "what it all means." I have connected the dots on my lil' columnist diner place mat, drawn a crude rocket ship and am ready to blast off into a sanctimonious stratosphere full of phrases like tainted, tarnished, shameful, irresponsible, rudderless, doesn't-get-it, sends-the-wrong-message and think-of-the-children.

Here goes:

None of this is that big of a deal.

Deflategate is just a fat pearl of sour grapes and anti-Patriots sentiment layered around a sand grain of an incident. The Clark story is a side effect of our growing understanding of domestic violence, not a relapse of the NFL's disease. McCoy is a disgruntled ex-employee firing broadsides. These are three molehills, not a mountain chain.

It's easy to play the NFL is in crisis mode angle these days, because the NFL will never not be in crisis mode, ever again.

The NFL will always be in crisis mode because NFL crises sizzle. They sell. We love telling each other how scandal-ridden the NFL is. It's like saying "the government is corrupt" or "major religions are hypocritical," but with exciting games to watch instead of political debates or sermons.

The NFL is also America's second safest conversational topic, after the weather. We can all criticize Roger Goodell in ways that we could never criticize the president or pope without offending half the people in the conversation. Onto the NFL, we project our national fears, failures and anxieties; the NFL's weaknesses make us feel better about ourselves.

Great Britain has the royals. America settles for King Roger and Bonnie Prince Brady.

Deflategate makes more sense as social satire than as an actual scandal. It's like Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock, with cosmic forces warring over 0.7 psi of air pressure instead of a snip of a maiden's hair. There are flawed heroes, complex villains, high stakes, sneaky maneuvers and a shady cover-up, plus an investigation with the scope of the hunt for the Zodiac killer. All that's missing is anything, anything at all, that ever had any real impact on anything.

It's hard to overstate just how ridiculous Deflategate is as a story. It's not Watergate, or Whitewater or a similar scandal. It's the president got an expensive haircut with YOUR tax dollars-level scandal-mongering. It's not Spygate, Bountygate or even Bullygate. It doesn't deserve a -gate suffix. It's overindulgent, overwrought and absurd. And if you think it will be more than a footnote and a comment-thread taunt two years from now, ask yourself: When is the last time you thought about Bountygate, which had an actual player-safety issue at its core?  

Al Bello/Getty Images

Brady should be suspended for the first quarter of the first Patriots game for violating a minor NFL rule; for his role in the Patriots' protracted and hyper-paranoid cover-up, he should be forced to shave off his beautiful hair. Similarly, for his constant persecution-complex pronouncements of innocence, Robert Kraft should be sentenced to eight hours in a room with people who actually believe him. (Darn right, Mister Kraft, it's all a conspiracy, except for the parts of your explanation that rewrite the rules of Newtonian physics. Now let us show you some proof of the moon-landing hoax.)

But when the entire world reacts to a pitcher with Vaseline on the brim of his cap like it's a president launching a secret war, the Patriots' instinct to circle the wagons is understandable. The NFL will always be in damage control mode when every ding in the door is perceived as "damage."

While the Patriots dealt with Deflategate, McCoy claimed in ESPN The Magazine that Chip Kelly systematically traded away his black superstars. McCoy's primary evidence is the fact that he himself was traded and replaced by…an even more famous black superstar: DeMarco Murray, the reigning rushing champion and Offensive Player of the Year. It's hard to argue that you lost your job in a purge of good black players when you were just replaced by a better black player.

Matt Rourke/Associated Press

Since McCoy brought up the topic of racially motivated transactions, we should point out that Kelly's nonstop free-agent and trading frenzy has brought players of all races. McCoy was traded for Kiko Alonso, who is half-Cuban, half-Colombian. Mexican-American Mark Sanchez will compete with Native American Sam Bradford for the starting quarterback job. Kelly's rumored ultimate goal was to trade up and draft half-Polynesian quarterback Marcus Mariota. His first-round draft pick, Nelson Agholor, was born in Nigeria. Kelly's transaction fever knows no continental boundaries.

I respect McCoy's feelings. I am old enough to remember when there were zero black NFL head coaches, and when black quarterbacks either changed positions or were labeled "athletes" with dubious leadership skills; that is to say, I am older than my early 30s. Racial biases have not been eliminated from the NFL or from any other aspect of society, but without any evidence—with what actually appears to be extremely contrary evidence—respecting McCoy's feelings is all I can do.

Domestic violence is a much more serious matter. A player committing an act of domestic violence is an important story. A team or league cover-up of a player's actions is an incredibly important story. A team drafting a player who committed a crime in November without performing a background check that met some arbitrary and probably unrealistic specifications we made up on the spot when we discovered (because this player was not famous enough to have his soul publicly weighed for four months) what he did? Well, it's worth talking about, but we may be spreading our moral outrage a little thin.

Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

The details of Frank Clark's November arrest are chilling. Details of domestic violence cases have always been chilling, even in the old days when police would calm the perpetrator down and tell the couple to work things out the next morning. The Seahawks are facing criticism for not interviewing witnesses on the scene of the violent hotel altercation. But the local prosecutor performed a thorough investigation. She lowered Clark's charges from domestic violence and assault to "persistent disorderly conduct." She told The Seattle Times that she does not believe Clark is a "batterer" (in the sense of a likely repeat offender) and has been frank with the media about her thought process in reducing Clark's charges.

I'm not sure just how thorough a background check on a problematic prospect is supposed to be. If a prosecutor is reducing charges and making soothing sounds about a player's character, perhaps some private eye on an NFL payroll shouldn't chase down witnesses to a domestic disturbance months after the fact. (We aren't talking about Goodell calling a casino and asking for a surveillance camera here.) If Seattle or some other team uncovers things that a district attorney missed, I'm worried more about our legal system than the NFL. At any rate, determining what a person did is just a small part of addressing domestic violence issues. Creating an environment where he does not do it again is a bigger part.

Criticism of the Clark selection is actually a positive sign. There is more discussion and transparency about domestic violence allegations, less rationalizing and excuse-making, than we saw when, say, Lawrence Phillips entered the NFL in 1996. We need to condemn the actions of individuals like Clark. We also need to get used to the fact that domestic violence will always be an issue for football players, just as it is an issue for realtors and teachers and sportswriters. We cannot froth at the mouth at months-old incidents simply because they just came to our attention. Sounding like an angry mob all the time makes us easy to tune out. Tuning them out is the one thing guaranteed to make domestic violence problems even worse.

It sounds like I am trivializing important issues. I am not. I am trivializing trivial stories related to important issues. The easiest way to trivialize issues is to lump a bunch of unrelated ones together under the usual "NFL:smh" banner. Deflategate, now going on its fourth month of preempting your regularly scheduled programming, is the ultimate triviality. It's a distraction dressed up as an issue, seducing us to treat real issues as distractions.

If everything is a four-alarm, NFL-changing crisis, nothing is.

The NFL will never be rid of weeks like these, because weeks like these are the inevitable residue of being as successful as the NFL. The NFL is what America loves to watch, wants to talk about, aspires to be. It is so much a part of our cultural fabric that it soaks up all of the racial and sexual tensions, the ambitions and resentments, the push-pull of the capitalist dream and spiritual ideals. Of course it is always besieged by scandals, allegations and recriminations. The NFL is too huge, powerful, ubiquitous and successful for anything else.

We need to be ready when the NFL drops the big balls. But we also need to let the air out of the many smaller stories that tend to get overinflated.

Just call me The Deflator.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.