The heated rhetoric between attorneys involved in the ongoing Deflategate saga continues to flood the federal docket, less than a week before both sides will meet before the judge who has been asking them to settle.
Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney representing Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, attacked NFL lawyers today, who yesterday dismissed 19 cases his team gave to U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman to review last week.
“(T)he NFL’s submission ignores how the denial of fundamental fairness in the arbitration at issue here so closely resembles the denials of fair process in the decisions we presented to the Court,” Kessler wrote in a two-page letter filed today in New York federal court.
Kessler and other union attorneys are working to overturn Brady’s four-game suspension, which was handed down by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. They have argued that Goodell should not have been the arbitrator to decide whether Brady was guilty of being generally aware that footballs may have been partially deflated during the 2015 AFC Championship.
On Aug. 19, attorneys for both sides argued their case to Berman. The judge spent considerable time poking holes in the NFL’s case, while allowing Kessler to argue with very little interruption. After finishing his argument, Kessler had one of his associates give Berman a list of cases that he said bolstered Brady’s case.
The NFL said the cases didn’t apply to Brady’s arbitration.
“These cases confirm that courts vacate arbitration awards only in extraordinary circumstances, none of which are present here,” NFL attorney Daniel Nash wrote yesterday.
That is the essence of the argument the NFL has made from the beginning: Judges very rarely overturn arbitration awards, and Berman should follow that rule in Brady’s case.
Brady’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that there are four reasons to overturn what they call an unprecedented suspension: that Brady had no notice; that no standards were set for testing the PSI of the footballs; that Goodell was biased; and that the arbitration was unfair.
Last week, Berman said if settlement talks in the case continue to be fruitless, he wants Brady and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in his court on Aug. 31. Berman indicated that his "current plan" is to try and have this case resolved before the start of the NFL season. Brady’s suspension would begin on Sept. 4 as of now.
On July 30, Berman implored both sides to “tone down their rhetoric” and “pursue a mutually acceptable resolution of this case.” With less than two weeks until kickoff, rhetoric is still heated, and no settlement agreement has been reached.
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