Ira Miller: Roger Goodell should find a graceful exit to Deflategate saga

We are well aware Roger Goodell knows how to shake every dollar out of a piggy bank and make money for NFL owners. In the next couple of weeks, we should learn if the commissioner has the common sense - and leadership - to back off and end a fight that never should have started.

The subject here is Deflategate, and the next saga in this long-running fight over the air pressure in a football is scheduled in a New York courtroom next week. It's the NFL's appeal of a judge's decision to throw out Goodell's four-game suspension of New England quarterback Tom Brady.

Right to the point: The league's case stinks. The NFL mishandled this from the start, spending millions on public relations and little on real investigation of what happened. Let's just say that Goodell is lucky this matter involved Robert Kraft and the Patriots, and not, say, the late Al Davis and the Raiders.

Davis would have had Goodell in another court faster than you can say, "deflate," and the case would have been thrown right out of court once it was established that Walt Anderson, the Deflate game referee, lost control of the footballs before kickoff of last year's AFC championship game.

This, by the way, is the one facet of the story we have not heard nearly enough about.

Goodell should count his blessings that he's not faced with the kind of adversary the late commissioner Pete Rozelle had to fight, and he should find a graceful exit. There are some.

Assuming that Brady is not about to back off, and there is no reason why he should, the most logical path for Goodell would be to successfully conclude negotiations with the NFL Players Association to modify the commissioner's role in resolving disputes. Goodell has had so many of his decisions overturned on appeal already that this should be, pardon the pun, an appealing avenue to him - and to his supporters within the league.

Although the commissioner is hired by the owners, of course, the ongoing fiction always has been that he is the commissioner for everybody - owners, players, coaches. Goodell has tried to bolster that line of thinking by assigning certain disciplinary cases to underlings. Now, he should get out of the discipline business entirely, and this is a good place to start.

This would allow Goodell to concentrate on what he does best, which is mint money for the owners. And a settlement with the NFLPA might be a better all-around resolution for both the league and Brady than allowing the courts to have the final say because it limits the downside risk. And, yes, there is downside risk for Goodell in this because he has staked so much time, energy, money and prestige on the case.

If he can somehow summon the will to negotiate a settlement on disciplinary proceedings with the union, it would actually be a statesmanlike move that would put aside the discussion over how the whole Deflategate case was mishandled from the start, and it would give Goodell cover with hawkish team owners who hate everything Brady and the Patriots have done and want to see even harsher punishment.

The other alternative for a graceful ending of the case would be to have the Court of Appeals simply dismiss the case with an understanding that the lower court's decision - the one wiping out Brady's punishment - does not set a precedent for any court.

That would resolve the Brady case and mean a ruling that it essentially was a "one-off situation" that would have no bearing on future matters, but - a big but - it would still leave open the question of who administers punishment in the future. And that's the big question the league needs to settle and that Goodell needs to put behind him.

Clearly, the first path is the best because a negotiated settlement eliminates the possibility of another issue coming up six months or a year from now and starting the same series of events all over again. The next one wouldn't have to be over air pressure, of course, it could be anything. And that's what Goodell and the league should be trying to avoid.

Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.