In deflate-gate appeal, Tom Brady and Roger Goodell are locked in a battle for reps that likely can't be fully recovered

Roger Goodell and Tom Brady, the NFL commissioner and the league's four-time Super Bowl quarterback, meet face-to-face in Manhattan on Tuesday morning. They will arrive with lawyers, teams of them.

Officially, Goodell is the judge and Brady is the convict seeking appellate relief from a four-game suspension and loss of about $1.8 million in salary for what the NFL deemed was his role in the deflation of footballs used in January's AFC championship game.

The fact the NFL never really proved the balls were actually, you know, deflated is just one reason this is like no other case in sports and why this is far more than trying to sort out the facts in a story with so few of them.

From the start, this has been built on the twin pillars of suspicion and perception, each side assuming the worst in each other's actions. It's been fueled by spin, speculation and media leaks, including the NFL allowing a story to run wild of trumped up allegations against Brady that was both extremely prejudicial and demonstrably untrue.

All these months later, all that's left is both Goodell and Brady trying to claw for a measure of respect in a strange scandal where each man's stature has been battered, perhaps beyond repair.

No doubt the lost games and money matter to Brady, but he'll arrive to fight mostly for his reputation. Goodell meanwhile is trying to walk a thin line that leaves him with the appearance of competency while trying to protect the NFL's judicial system – and investigative process – a task that grows more challenging with each critical independent review of Ted Wells' report on the matter.

Desperate as they are, neither has much of a chance to fully succeed. They'll sit down high above Park Avenue as dual, yet dueling prisoners to a story that is rewriting their legacies.

To some segment of the population, probably a quite sizable one, Tom Brady is a cheater and always will be. A prolonged media circus, bizarrely fueled by the NFL itself, and then given credibility by Ted Wells' report, is too much to fully overcome.

Brady is seeking full exoneration here, yet even in the unlikely scenario Goodell would grant it, when it comes to the ruthless court of public opinion, it's probably too late.

Goodell could admit the NFL got the entire deflate-gate story completely wrong, deem Wells' report speculative and flawed, and admit that reckless leaks to ESPN turned this molehill into a mountain and many would still shrug.

The league has so little credibility that the presumption among many is that Goodell was just playing favorites, or made a deal to clear Brady in exchange for Patriots owner Robert Kraft standing down, or the NFL caved to television ratings. No one thinks anything is on the up and up.

And after all, there will still be a Patriots lackey who called himself "The Deflator." There will still be the fact that same guy brought the footballs into a bathroom just before kickoff. There will be Wells' focus on Brady not sharing all possible information. There will still be Spygate, even if it's not related.

There will still be enough smoke to cry fire, which is what Wells' report always counted on.

That's just modern society.

Brady's only viable game plan here is to reverse his ill-advised strategy of not allowing the league to review select communications on his phone. While he has an extremely compelling argument about privacy and how he shouldn't be saddled with the presumption of guilt and how the penalty far outweighed any previous charges of lack of cooperation, waging battles like that comes with a price.

Wells and the NFL seized on it by painting Brady as someone with something to hide. In the law and order segments of NFL fans (and there are many) not "fully cooperating" is akin to pleading guilty. The league played to that emotion.

Likewise there is virtually no scenario that allows Goodell to put the NFL in a good light here. Even those who believe that Brady is as guilty as sin should admit that Wells' report is problematic and the behavior of the league office was troublesome.

And for Goodell, nothing good comes out of any light being shined on this bizarre (albeit collectively bargained) system of jurisprudence.

For instance, on Tuesday, Ted Wells, author of the much-maligned report that crushed Brady and the Pats, is expected to answer questions in front of Goodell, who merely hired him in the first place and then entrusted him with the league's reputation.

Recusal appears to be a lost concept.

Yet can Goodell really stick with Wells' report and the conclusions that suspended Brady for a whopping four games? It would allow Goodell to play his preferred role of authoritative figure, but almost any careful consideration of Wells concludes that it is a complete mess. Worse for Goodell is that, like Brady, his office's own decisions painted him into a corner for critics to blast.

Deflate-gate blew up when a little more than a day after the AFC title game, ESPN, citing unnamed league sources, reported that 11 of the Patriots' 12 footballs were measured to be below 2 pounds per square inch of pressure below the league standard. It further said none of the Indianapolis Colts' footballs were below the minimum.

At the time, the only people with such information worked in the league office. That ESPN story changed the entire complexion of deflate-gate. No longer was this a curious case of potential gamesmanship on a subject that no one, including the NFL itself, had much base scientific information or previous concern about.

Instead it looked like an outright and deliberate cheating scandal, and a major one at that. It couldn't be a coincidence. It couldn't be natural. Someone needed to be punished.

Except the entire ESPN story was wrong. No Patriots football came in that low. None. Most weren't even close. And the few Colts footballs anyone bothered to measure suffered deflation also. The entire framing of the story was completely inaccurate.

If it was originally sold to the public as "some Patriots footballs were a little low, but others weren't and we used two different gauges to check so the numbers varied and we aren't sure what's normal to begin with and no one wrote down the original measurements and we ran out of time to do the Colts' conclusively so who knows about that and it was cold out and ... " this meeting isn't happening.

The league office is guilty of either leaking the fake story in the first place or, at the very least, not coming out to refute it with the actual measurement it had in its possession. Instead the NFL let Brady and the Patriots get crushed. What turned out minor was major. What was confusing was painted as clear. What begged for context was instead stamped as concrete.

The actions of the NFL are far more troublesome than whatever some New England lackey did in the bathroom, with or without Tom Brady's knowledge.

It's why Roger Goodell doesn't want that to become the story.

So now, perhaps, comes the mop-up, two men supposedly on opposite sides of the process – plaintiff and judge – are both actually square in the middle of it all, fighting for themselves, fighting against each other.

How much can Brady win back? How much can Goodell give back? Does Brady have to hand over his cell phone information? How does Goodell maintain any respectability without blowing the lid off the entire mess? How far under the oncoming train can Wells get thrown? Or does the league just stick to its story and count on fans to not care?

Brady may certainly be as guilty as Ted Wells says he is, but sometimes prosecutors are saddled with so-called "bad facts," botched investigations and internal conduct that corrupt the mission.

A judge is supposed to sort that out. There is no judge on Tuesday, just Roger Goodell, who will sit across from a man even richer and more famous than he, even more the face of America's most popular sport as he, and try to pretend he isn't as much a combatant. He is. Both men will be fighting for the same thing, salvaging something from this confused saga that has spun so far out of control there really can be no winner.