5 Reasons You Should Keep Paying Attention to Deflategate

Oh no, not another Deflategate column.

Just the presence of the word "Deflategate" in the headline may have given you the urge to throw your smartphone against the wall in disgust—or at least sent you scrolling hurriedly away to read some nice, safe NBA article. You reached your saturation level for distillations of the contents of 61-page briefs to circuit courts, dissertations by Ph.D. physicists on science basics and comment-thread turf wars between the Free Brady and Cheatriots gangs long ago.          

And yet you clicked this article and are still reading. For that, I thank you.

After a never-ending series of legal and public opinion twists and turns that threatens to last longer than an elephant pregnancy, Deflategate no longer has anything to say to you. Or so you think. In fact, Deflategate is more than just an ear-splitting car alarm right outside your window that never shuts off. The controversy can still inform, or at least entertain, if you approach it the right way.

There are plenty of wrong ways to approach Deflategate. Don't wade into the controversy expecting to:

• Determine Tom Brady's guilt or innocence. You already made your mind up one way or the other. The legal battles of Deflategate began on a frontier far from the question of whether Brady ever ordered any underlings to deflate footballs and have been moving toward a vanishing point of procedural hair-splitting ever since. Wednesday's "major development," reported by Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, was a friend-of-the-court brief by professional arbiter Kenneth Feinberg that was essentially about the profession of arbitrating. Deflategate exists in a legal gravity well from which clear thought and money cannot escape.

• Learn something about science. If you want to learn about the ideal gas law, consult a seventh-grade science textbook. Deflategate science is all about academics overcomplicating middle school physics—it's like listening to chefs from Le Cordon Bleu explain toast—to make Patriots fans feel extra righteous while the real legal debates center around cellphone records, investigative procedures and the commissioner's legal and collectively bargained right to make stupid decisions.

• Determine who will win the AFC East. The Patriots will win, even with Jimmy Garoppolo running the offense for four games. Who is going to stop them, Christian Hackenberg?

• Determine Brady's legacy. We should be more worried about our legacy as the generation that allowed this to happen.

Venture into Deflategate looking for big answers on the right-wrong, innocence-guilt or temperature-pressure fronts, and you will only leave disappointed and confused.

But here are five reasons Deflategate does still matter. Come at the controversy from the proper angle, and you will at least find it more amusing, if not necessarily fulfilling.

5. Deflategate is America's greatest source of ironic cultural metacommentary

The longer the legal battle wages, the more Deflategate looks like a postmodern deconstruction of runaway bureaucracy instead of sports news. It's like Terry Gilliam's Brazil or some dense David Foster Wallace metafiction. But it's 100 percent real, which gives it a horrifying, compelling beauty, like watching time-lapse photography of buzzards picking at a carcass.

Bob Leverone/Associated Press

The trick to appreciating Deflategate at this level is to stop thinking of Roger Goodell, Brady and the other participants as real, living humans—you probably have not thought of Goodell as human in years—and imagine them instead as characters in a tale of feudal Japan or some dystopian future in which lawyers live on cloud cities and raise the rest of us as livestock. Suddenly, the boring legal maneuvers feel ritualistic and stylized, while the grotesque elements of the controversy—like the tax dollars and human toil squandered or the incredible emotional investment some people have in the outcome—coalesce into a source of bleak humor, a kind of Deflategate Centipede.

Of course, Deflategate is also a sober, terrifying look at our legal system in action. Brady at least has the resources to gum up the system; the rest of us would just be ground into ultrafine, financially and emotionally bankrupt powder by it. If your only options are laughter and tears, you might as well choose laughter.

4. You could profit from Deflategate

That 10.5-win over/under that VegasInsider.com has posted for the Patriots is whispering to you. It's saying, "Play me! Play me!" Take the over, wait for Brady's lawyers to perform some courtroom jiu-jitsu, and you can collect your winnings in time for holiday shopping season.

Not a gambler? Then maybe fantasy's your game! Remember how the guy who drafted Brady in the sixth round last year won your league? (Yes, he also drafted Devonta Freeman in the last round and grabbed Gary Barnidge as a waiver claim, but never mind.) Remember how you sat on Garoppolo for four months, wondering how your opening-month strategy was suddenly ripped from beneath your feet hours before the season started?

Don't let it happen again. Follow Deflategate and you will know which way the wind is blowing. The odor is unmistakable.

3. Deflategate could improve your working conditions

The AFL-CIO announced its support of Brady recently, as labor organizations usually do when workers duel with management. The AFL-CIO and other powerful unions should also use Deflategate as a reason to send a loud message to every collective bargaining organization in America: Be extra careful not to give away the disciplinary farm when negotiating over management authority, appeals, arbitration or other "fine print."

Richard Drew/Associated Press

Brady's current appeal for a rehearing of the NFL's successful appeal of the U.S. District Court decision to vacate Brady's suspension (that clause alone may have taken four years off your life, but keep reading)  hinges on a tiny clause in the collective bargaining agreement that gives Goodell the right to serve as the hearing officer in all appeals. Basically, Goodell gets to operate within a rigged disciplinary system because the NFLPA told him that he could. Brady's lawyers have done a heck of a job demonstrating that Goodell has a hard time even following procedures that more or less allow him to do whatever he wants as long as he follows procedures. But judges and lawmakers hate to tinker under the hood of a collectively bargained settlement because it defeats the purpose of collective bargaining settlements.

If you are a teacher, firefighter, telecommunications employee or anyone who works under collectively bargained conditions, your last contract was probably settled the way the 2011 NFL contract was settled: in a heated, emotional atmosphere, under a tight deadline, with everyone minding the money and very few people focusing on disciplinary processes. Deflategate gives you reason to open up the contract or ask your shop representative what would happen if you were the one appealing an unjust, overzealous penalty.

2. Deflategate allows us to discuss politics without an argument

One of the many things that makes Captain America: Civil War such a great movie—besides spectacular action, crisp writing, a sharp sense of humor and no major plot points centered around the coincidence that two characters' mothers had the same first name—is the fact that it gives America a chance to come to grips with our feelings about authority and the abuse of power. Our old chums Cap and Iron Man came to blows over questions of liberty versus security and the role and limits of government so that we (hopefully) won't have to during a fractious political period.

Deflategate offers us a similar chance to express our feelings about the rights and responsibilities of individuals, governments, corporations and unions in a conversational safe zone far afield from hot-button politics and personalities. After all, no matter what you or Uncle Carmine might think of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, it is always socially OK to hate Goodell.

Deflategate, like Civil War, may be our last chance to explore both sides of myriad complex social issues before election season makes us all crazy people. Maybe Captain America shouldn't have to submit to government oversight and turn his mind-controlled buddy over to the feds. And maybe Brady shouldn't have to submit the contents of his cellphone to Goodell. Then again, knowing the Winter Soldier was at large would scare the hell out of you in real life, and it's not so crazy to think that a football commissioner who is expected to take stands on important social issues should be able to wield considerable power when it comes to, well, actual footballs.

1. If you are going to get dragged into conversation anyway, you might as well feel informed

Ignorance is not bliss with Deflategate. Take your eyes off the story for a moment, and you are suddenly blindsided by some new development. Then you end up getting ear-holed at a party or the local tavern by some Patriots hater or Brady booster, or by your old aunt who doesn't care about the NFL but misunderstood a snippet of news and wants you to explain to her why Brady is going to jail for refusing to blow something up.

How do you respond? Saying "I don't follow Deflategate" just won't work. Try that on a guy in a Mike Vrabel jersey. It's like telling a door-to-door preacher that you don't follow an organized religion. Knowing the facts is just easier. It also gives you a feeling of control over a controversy so ridiculous yet all-consuming that it can make you feel helpless.

There's an old proverb that goes: If you watch something for a minute and find it boring, then watch it for an hour. Deflategate looks less like a bunch of millionaires and their lawyers/lackeys playing badminton with their entitlements and more like something grand and primordial—a trickling creek carving out a canyon, a Tibetan monk creating and ritually destroying an elaborate sand mandala—when you embrace it instead of holding it at arm's length.

Take Deflategate into your heart. Make it part of you. Will it make you happier or smarter? Not really. But true wisdom often starts with giving in to the inevitable.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.