Roger Goodell's handling of deflate-gate has become three-ring circus

One month has passed since Tom Brady's appeal hearing in deflate-gate. One month and Roger Goodell still hasn't announced a decision.

Nothing. No upholding the suspension. No reversing the suspension. No lightening of the suspension. This isn't a Supreme Court case. This isn't complicated. It shouldn't take a month of leaving a player hung out to dry, as the biggest storyline going into the start of training camp remains an overblown, self-inflicted soap opera from last season.

One month and Goodell still can't figure out what to do, which somehow isn't really all that surprising since if he knew what to do in the first place the entire story would have been snuffed out in a day or so – or however long it took the NFL to figure out it has no idea, let alone any actual proof, that the footballs at the AFC title game were even all that deflated.

The Washington Post is reporting some owners are trying to figure out how the NFL commissioner can come out of this appearing "credible and looking like he's dealing from a position of strength." They might try encouraging him to just rule on the evidence rather than go with that pipe dream, but whatever.

Meanwhile, ProFootballTalk reports that a "small group of influential owners" are pushing Goodell to uphold the suspension, so it's nice to see some lobbying of the commissioner by rival teams who didn't participate in the disciplinary process.

It's not a coincidence that Brady and the NFL Players Association are left to do their own saber rattling in the media, claiming they'll sue everyone and everything if the New England Patriots quarterback isn't exonerated.

There are three rings to this circus.

It's fairly easy to envision Goodell locked in his office trying to figure out how to get out of a mess in which he put himself, the league and Brady. One month later and he apparently hasn't figured it out … or had anyone figure it for him.

This is truly one of the dumbest scandals in sports history, a molehill the NFL turned into a mountain.

It bears repeating there remains no proof the footballs were even significantly deflated in deflate-gate. For all the curiousness and suspicion from having some Foxborough locker room lackey calling himself "The Deflator" and taking the balls into a bathroom just before kickoff, he may not have even deflated anything.

That should have been obvious to the NFL within a day of the AFC championship game. You'd think the league would have started there.

At halftime of that game, referee Walt Anderson had taken some convoluted measurements that came in with a wide range of data, many of them not particularly out of the norm. That's in part because of natural gas law, in part because this could in no way be considered any place for accurate scientific work and in part because Anderson used separate, and wildly different, gauges to take the data.

At that point the NFL should have realized that this case was a loser. Suspicious district attorneys have to do this all the time and just refuse to prosecute. Even if the league thought the Pats were up to something, generally you have to have some kind of decent evidence.

Besides, the NFL had never in its history cared about the inflation level of footballs, even in a league that loves creating rules for all known circumstances. It has no idea how footballs are naturally affected by various weather elements or contact. It never dawned on the league to care until an untimely episode occurred right before the Super Bowl.

A good commissioner, or a good leader of any organization, would have bailed, squashed, protected and vowed to solve the problem going forward. No way this is a scandal in the NBA or even in the old NFL.

Fine the Pats for lack of proper pregame protocol because a guy took the footballs into the bathroom. Then call it case closed.

Instead after a little more than a day of collecting basic evidence and interviews, ESPN coincidentally (or not) ran with a bombshell report that 11 of the 12 Patriots footballs were underinflated by more than two pounds per square inch and, conversely, none of the Indianapolis Colts' measured as such.

It was damning.

It was also completely false.

None of the Patriots footballs were so deflated and only four Colts footballs were even measured, so that didn't matter. Someone at Goodell's office may or may not have leaked it – the league office appears to be the only entity at the time with the info. Even if it didn't, the league, equipped with the truth, failed to either refute it or just pass the info onto the Patriots. The league even fed the Pats similarly frightening, and inaccurate, data.

Essentially, whoever leaked it to ESPN counted on the report being so big that the public would believe it no matter what came out later.

It worked.

ESPN has never retracted it even though the actual stats show it breathlessly ran with bad info. The NFL has declined comment on it. Ted Wells didn't investigate how such a media leak could occur, even though he printed the ball measurements that proved it a lie.

Heck, Wells even decided to not take Anderson's word for which gauge he used on which measurements and instead just decided the ref misremembered.

The Wells Report, the independent investigation commissioned by the league, is long though, 243 pages. And it's repetitive, the lawyers just repeating the same stuff over and over like a desperate high school kid trying to pump up a term paper to the proper length.

It takes a while to read and you really have to concentrate and you actually have to go through it a couple times because it's poorly written. This seems intentional.

While plenty of people believe the Patriots and Brady cheated, there are far fewer who have read and studied the Wells Report with an open mind who believe it to be anything but a pile of junk.

You can even believe Brady did it, or at least this was extremely suspicious – as I tend to do – and be appalled at a league office that is willing to suspend him for four games with not just little to no evidence that he did anything but little to no evidence that anything even happened.

It's like an endless hall of mirrors that keeps going and going.

Now the owners are scrambling to find a way to make Roger Goodell's office look competent? And other owners are pressuring for him to stick it to the Patriots, likely well aware that bailing on this case now will only cause further embarrassment?

It's been six months since Walt Anderson couldn't figure out if the balls were all that deflated. It's been one month since Brady spent 10 hours arguing his appeal. It's less than a week to the start of training camp.

Roger Goodell is in his office, still not ready to say what he's going to do.