Jul 16, 2016 4 min read

Tom Brady punted.

Americans everywhere should be glad the United States Supreme Court was not requested to hear Brady’s appeal of his four-game suspension by the NFL.

Not because Brady didn’t deserve a reversal – he doesn’t – but because the court can concentrate on things that matter.

And now the New England Patriots will have Jimmy Garoppolo at quarterback for the first four games of the season.

It says here they won’t miss Brady much. He’s a great quarterback, but he’s not close to being the greatest of all time and Patriots/Brady haters everywhere should be rooting for Garoppolo to go 4-0 and put up a 110 passer rating just to see what head coach Bill Belichick would do when Brady’s suspension is completed.

Maybe you needed scientific evidence to prove the footballs were deflated before the AFC Championship game in 2015.

I didn’t.

One of the Patriots’ equipment managers being nicknamed “The Deflator” and Brady destroying his cellphone was enough for me.

And only someone who has never thrown a football would believe letting a little air out of one on a cold, wet day wouldn’t give a quarterback an advantage.

Patriots owner Bob Kraft, whose team lost a No. 1 draft pick and $1 million, released a statement after Brady’s decision: “The penalty imposed by the NFL was unprecedented, unjust and unreasonable, especially given that no empirical or direct evidence of any kind showed Tom did anything to violate league rules prior to, during or after the 2015 AFC championship game,”

The penalty wasn’t unjust or unreasonable. Letting air out of the balls gave the Patriots an unfair advantage in an AFC Championship game. That’s not a small thing.

But Kraft has to know this case should have become known as Last Strawgate. The other NFL owners were/are tired of the Patriots cheating. They believed NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell let them off easy on Spygate, when Belichick gained a huge advantage by illegally video taping coaches’ sideline signals.

After the Steelers lost to the Patriots in the 2001 AFC Championship game, Hines Ward said, “It was like they knew what we were doing on every play.”

They probably did.

ESPN The Magazine did an excellent job last September of explaining why Goodell’s bosses – the 31 other owners – were pressuring him to come down hard on the Patriots for Deflategate. They were suspicious of the way he, Kraft and Belichick destroyed the Spygate tapes so quickly.

“And some would conclude it was as if Goodell, Kraft and Belichick had acted like partners, complicit in trying to sweep the scandal’s details under the rug while the rest of the league was left wondering how much glory the Patriots’ cheating had cost their teams.

“Goodell didn’t want anybody to know that his gold franchise had won Super Bowls by cheating,” a senior executive whose team lost to the Patriots in a Super Bowl said. “If that gets out, that hurts your business.”

So, outside of New England, nobody is feeling sorry for Brady or the Patriots. They both got exactly what they deserved.

• In 1976, 36 million people watched the Major League Baseball All-Star Game on television. Nine million watched Tuesday night’s game. That means 91 percent of the people watching television in the United States Tuesday night were not watching the All-Star Game.

• You will never meet a nicer man than Jack Riley, the Penguins’ first general manager, who died Thursday at the age of 97. He was a Pittsburgher, who lived in the same house he bought when the Penguins hired him and he moved here in 1966.

He was the epitome of Canadian friendliness and class.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday sports column for the Observer-Reporter.