There were multiple teams caught this past year, putting sticky substances on gloves, and other equipment violations - the only NFL response was the $25,000 fine deemed appropriate by league rules. Goodell likes to make up his own rules, whenever he wants too, and he's so afraid of doing ANYTHING that doesn't satisfy the mob at this point, it was obvious that they were going to come down ridiculously hard on Brady and the Patriots.
I don't hate the Patriots, I respect what they've done. But other than saying 'Goodell does what Goodell wants to do' (or his lackeys do), it's hard to justify this kind of penalty. If you're going to lay the smackdown for cheating, you need to be consistent, and this is totally inconsistent with other instances of tampering with equipment or breaking minor league rules, and the penalties that have been imposed. I know the next argument will be that the penalty isn't about the rules violation, it's about lying about the rules violation. Only problem is, in almost every other instance of minor 'cheating' in the past several years, teams have initially denied it and played dumb. It's kind of par for the course in sports.
I think this is mostly much ado about nothing, as evidenced by the fact that Brady played like crap with the supposed 'advantage' of deflated balls, and lit it up once they were corrected to the supposedly disadvantageous proper weight. The whole thing is stupid to begin with - as the NFL could prevent every bit of possible 'tampering' simply by not allowing teams to 'prep' the balls at all, or doing whatever general prep is desirable (breaking balls in) consistently behind the scenes.