Tim Tebow Is Why Goodell Got Away With Bountygate

I remember the day very well and I said that right after it happened. It was the same day of the tornado outbreak--one of them hit my neighborhood.

All of the talk that week was that Goodell was coming down with the punishments that week or next and people were speculating about it. Then after I got back in my car after making sure my house was okay, word of the Tim Tebow trade came down. I got an alert on my phone. 15 minutes later when I got back to work word came out that the punishments came down.

And for the next week, until Tebow's first press conference in New York on Monday, he was THE STORY. Bountygate was put on the back burner. Everybody was too busy to look into the punishment and evidence. Roger said he had 50,000 pages of evidence and nobody bothered to ask about that. He said he warned them, and that was taken at face value. By the time, Tebowmania calmed down and everybody started talking about Bountygate, Roger controlled the narrative. People had already seen the legal and un-penalized hits on Favre and Warner over and over and over and over and decided they were guilty.

Now, before you put words in my mouth, I didn't say that the Tebow trade was part of a larger conspiracy. I did say that Roger deliberately made the announcement to coincide with the trade announcement knowing that that was his best chance to get that story buried in the press. That's Public Relations 101, not black helicopters. The same way he announced that he upheld the player suspensions at 5:00 Eastern on July 3.