Now that the Shield has played it’s leverage masterfully in issuing a seasons’ eve deadline for the “Al Jazeera 4” to meet with the Commish or face an open ended, immediate suspension, I thought it was worthwhile to point you to this following article.
It is by Tim Rohan of the MMQB, and it is frankly a masterpiece.
In there, you will see all the tricks (dirty, and cliched alike) Goodell likes to play, and I am certain they will be in full use for these guys.
I don’t know about you, but I would hate to have to answer questions about a TV report that has since been recanted, by an ISIS sympathizing TV network that is now out of business!
Talk about flying blind! Who knows, what the NFL knows, or what they *think* they know, or what somebody “told them” about you and PEDs?
Here’s the edited nut of what the Saints Anthony Hargrove had to go through, in the wake of #Bountygate…
Then Hargrove got on the elevator was directed to go down to a lower level. Down? The elevator kept going and going, descending into what Hargrove said “seemed like hell.” His heart sank into his stomach. This wasn’t what he had planned for. Hargrove walked into a large windowless room, and there was Goodell, standing, reaching out to shake his hand, and there was White, and what felt like an army of faceless people who didn’t look friendly.
Hargrove couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he were going to have a heart attack. He started doing breathing exercises as he took his seat, giving himself a pep talk, the way he might before a big game. This felt bigger than a game. “I was fighting for my career against a machine, or a monster,” Hargrove said. “They have the power to end your career!”The room in the basement where the NFL took Hargrove was what a league official described as a “multipurpose room,” a place used “when there is a need for privacy away from the rest of the building.” Tom Brady had his Deflategate hearing there.
In Hargrove’s case, Mary Jo White led the charge, pummeling him with questions. “She would ask the same kind of questions over and over and over,” said Phil Williams, Hargrove’s agent, who was in the meeting. “She kept trying to trap Tony.” Williams wondered when the two union lawyers there would step in.
Goodell sat quietly, Williams said, “until he felt like there might be blood in the water” and thought White was about to catch Hargrove in a lie. Goodell would lean forward in his chair quickly. His eyes would get excited. Then, Williams said, when Hargrove would talk his way out of it, Goodell would get red and slide back in his chair.At one point, Hargrove requested that White just reference the interview he did with a league investigator named Joe Hummel in 2010, at the outset of the Bountygate affair. The NFL side of the room seemed startled by that. They took a recess and huddled. Then, according to Hargrove and Williams, the league said there was no record of the interview and that another man had conducted it. What? Hargrove had been sitting there with Hummel, face to face. (A league official maintains the stance Hummel was not the one who interviewed Hargrove.) There, in a windowless room in the basement of the NFL offices, Hargrove felt hopeless.“It became clear to me,” Hargrove said, “it was going to be difficult for me to prove myself innocent because they were going to conjure whatever truth they needed to make it believable to the public. That was the hardest thing to swallow. You feel like you’re screaming at the top of your lungs, and no one’s listening.
Czabe is right: you can’t prove a negative.
Hey Czabe, f**k all that. Where’s the article on the Ireland trip?