The NFL Lawyer Behind the Colin Kaepernick Workout Fiasco is a Major Deflategate Co-Conspirator
In case you were too busy this weekend watching college football or Episode 2 of "The Mandalorian" or otherwise doing that thing that's sometimes referred to a "living" and you missed it, the Colin Kaepernick workout turned out to be a utter goatfuck thanks to both Kaepernick and the NFL. I'd call it a Dog & Pony Show if I saw any reason to insult dogs or ponies, who delight children and don't deserve to be insulted with the comparison.
In a nutshell, 20 minutes before the workout was supposed to begin at the Atlanta Falcons facility at Flowery Branch, Kaepernick's people moved it to another location an hour away. Do the math. The couple of dozen team personnel representatives who were pressured by the league to show up and give this waste of time the appearance of legitimacy did the math. And the vast majority of them took the next available flight home.
This was reportedly after the NFL had agreed to all of Kapernick's terms, including allowing him to have a film crew on hand to turn the whole thing into a Nike ad.
Then Kaepernick's people let it be known that the reason for the move was because an NFL lawyer handed them a couple of waivers. Not just the standard kind with the boilerplate language that would absolve them and the Falcons of blame if he got hurt, like a school field trip permission slip.
No, the league went a step further by demanding he sign another one that would make it so he can't sue them if he didn't end up on a team. Like Dwight Shrute giving Michael a stack of papers and hoping he signs them all without noticing one gives Dwight the authority to fire Jim. And the legal genius behind the scam has a familiar name:
Source - As a source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT, when Kaepernick’s camp suggested a standard injury waiver that didn’t sweep broadly to absolve the NFL from its ongoing violation of his rights, league representatives said that the proposed release had been drafted by NFL general counsel Jeff Pash, and that Pash wanted his release to be signed.
Pash’s name constantly has been mentioned behind the scenes as the person who was believed to have devised this entire scheme. …
At this point, given the clumsy, awkward manner in which Pash’s scheme has played out, the only way to avoid a second lawsuit from Kaepernick could be to do what should have been done in the first place, if the league truly wanted to help Kaepernick: Pick up the phone and make whatever deal has to be made behind the scenes with one of the NFL’s teams to give the guy a job.
The rest of the world won't recognize Jeff Pash's name, but Patriots fans will. If we had a bulletin board with a flow chart of the Deflategate Crime Family, Pash would've been a caporegime, with his mugshot on the next tier down from the boss Roger Goodell himself.
To review, Pash was the NFL's legal counsel that the Patriots sent emails to, begging and pleading with him to set the record straight when ESPN and other news outlets were falsely reporting the psi numbers, over and over again. The NFL knew the real pressure numbers and that they were way higher than the 2.0 psi below the limit that was being talked about. They knew the fake numbers were being leaked by their own people. And Pash himself is supposed to represent all 32 teams equally. So the Patriots attorneys were imploring him to do the work they pay him to do and stop the damage to the team's image. And he gave them the corporate lawyerspeak version of "go piss up a rope." Saying among other things,“I have doubts that piecemeal disclosures are likely to accomplish much.If anything, I would think they are likely to prompt additional questions, additional stories, and additional irresponsible speculation and commentary. Once the investigation is completed and the facts are known, any incorrect reporting will be shown for what it is."
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The "incorrect reporting" was finally corrected. 77 days later. In The Wells Report. A document that was crafted for the sole purpose of claiming Tom Brady was guilty of cheating. And so no one gave a tinker's damn about the fact the phony numbers had been out there for 2 1/2 months.
And Jeff Pash would know. Because he co-wrote The Wells Report. Or, as he later tried to claim, just sort of edited it for grammar and spelling or something. So a supposedly fair and impartial $5 million investigation didn't involve fake numbers and was researched by a notoriously crooked science-for-hire lab in Exponent, it was written in part by an NFL lawyer. Sounds fair.
Then, when Brady's side wanted to question Pash as a material witness, he claimed he couldn't because he represents the league so it's an attorney-client privilege situation. Something Judge Berman shredded him for when he ruled in Brady's favor. “Denied the opportunity to examine Pash at the arbitral hearing, Brady was prejudiced,” he wrote in his decision. “He was foreclosed from exploring, among other things, whether the Pash/Wells Investigation was truly ‘independent,’ and how and why the NFL’s General Counsel came to edit a supposedly independent investigation report."
Anyway, that's history. It's not history any Pats fan needs to or should get over just because Brady got his revenge in the form of three championships since Deflategate. Because it still cost us draft picks we'll never get back. Including a 1st rounder that could've been the next Vince Wilfork or the next Dont'a Hightower.
It's just that it's good to hear the conniving, weaselly, Saul Goodmanesque Attorney Jeff Pash is the legal genius behind this latest embarrassment to the NFL. He was tasked with making the Colin Kaepernick situation go away once and for all, and he's only made it worse. He cocked it up just like the did the Deflatgate witch hunt. And once again the richest league on planet Earth still somehow manages to employ the most incompetent idiots in the world. Couldn't happen to a sleazier lawyer.