Fansided

Patriots owner Robert Kraft says he will “reluctantly” accept the NFL’s Deflategate punishment

By Stanford Crissey

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The New England Patriots will accept the NFL penalties, including a $1 million fine and loss of draft picks.

Well, it seems that all the talk of the outraged Patriots appealing their Deflategate penalties was much ado about nothing. After a week of public outrage and promises to appeal, Robert Kraft has decided to throw up his hands and surrender.

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This certainly is a surprising turn of events. Kraft has been expressing public outrage ever since the initial punshment from the league came down. Kraft also told the MMQB’s Peter King that “To receive the harshest penalty in league history is just not fair. The anger and frustration with this process, to me, it wasn’t fair,” and was very adamant about appealing the punishments.

The Patriots’s punishment for deflating game balls from the AFC Championship game included a four-game suspension for quarterback Tom Brady, a $1 million fine for the franchise, and the loss of first-round and fourth-round draft choices.

The reaction included having his team of lawyers draw up a response and posting it to a team-owned website called WellsReportContext.com. Kraft was extremely angry when the punishment was first handed down, but now it seems that he’s changed his tune. 

Why might that be? It’s possible that Kraft simply decided the appeal wasn’t worth the headaches and additional publicity (especially with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell overseeing the hearing). However it has also been speculated that the NFL made a backdoor deal with the Patriots to avoid the appeal. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Monday that the NFL and the Patriots were discussing the matter through “back-channel conversations” that could result in a reduction in Tom Brady’s suspension.

This new piece of news will just add fuel to that fire.

Of course, it’s possible that the Patriots just knew when to admit defeat, and Kraft’s comments are simply the team taking a knee rather than fight out a losing battle. But don’t be surprised if the league annouces a reduction in Brady’s suspension in the coming days. After all, every major punishment that comes from the NFL seems to be modified at some point–including Josh Gordon last year, whose suspenion was cut from 16 games to 10, or Ray Rice, whose ban was extended from two games to basically infinity games. The league never seems to get it right the first time, so maybe they’ve extended an olive branch to Kraft in the hopes of avoiding a long, highly public appeal process. Time will tell.

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