Roger Goodell reportedly ignores settlement offer over Tom Brady’s suspension

The NFL Players Assn. made a settlement offer to the league regarding Tom Brady’s four-game Deflategate suspension and never got a response, according to multiple media reports on Thursday.

A source told the Associated Press that the offer was “met with silence.”

That sounds about right. It pretty much fits with what we’ve been getting from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on the matter since he heard Brady’s appeal on June 23.

Unless you count comments like the ones he made at a fund-raiser last week: “There is no timeline. We want to make sure we have a fair and open process.”

And: “We are focused on it. We are obviously being very thorough and want to make sure we consider all aspects of his appeal. We will make a decision as quickly as possible.”

The players association has said it would fight any type of suspension for Brady, so it’s likely the settlement offer involved dropping the ban and perhaps replacing it with a fine.

And while ending this mess would be nice for Goodell, it’s improbable that he would abandon his initial decision that Brady deserves to miss games for being “generally aware” the Patriots were playing with underinflated balls during the AFC Championship game, as an NFL-commissioned investigation by attorney Ted Wells concluded in May.

So maybe no response from Goodell was the best way for him to handle the settlement offer. He apparently doesn’t need any kind of distraction right now. Let’s just let him focus on the matter at hand and hopefully get us one step closer to some sort of resolution.

Twitter: @chewkiii

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