Unfortunately, I have to agree with you that Mr. Brady's brand value had a huge impact on the token penalties levied.
Red:
Check out the variety of sanctions -- mostly suspensions -- the NFL have assigned to various players for various infractions.
Particularly, take a look at the NFL's 2007 statement to Titans cornerback, Adam Jones.
Your conduct has brought embarrassment and ridicule upon yourself, your club, and the NFL, and has damaged the reputation of players throughout the league. You have put in jeopardy an otherwise promising NFL career, and have risked both your own safety and the safety of others through your off-field actions. In each of these respects, you have engaged in conduct detrimental to the NFL and failed to live up to the standards expected of NFL players. Taken as a whole, this conduct warrants significant sanction.
Apparently the NFL feel that one must shoot someone before they deem one's conduct as having brought "embarrassment and ridicule upon [oneself, one's] club, and the NFL, and has damaged the reputation of players throughout the league."
Really?
As deplorable and unconsionable as shooting another person is, it's the type of action that I'd hardly consider as being potentially indicative of rampant depravity among NFL employees and owners. There is a huge difference in my mind between a dishonorable act carried out on the sly and in the service of one's own monetary benefit and personal/professional fame as compared with a shooting in a nightclub.
Mr. Jones almost certainly felt the other party may have done him wrong, and shooting the guy was clearly the wrong way to handle the matter. I in no way care to defend or condone what Mr. Adams did, but his behavior reflects only on himself. If there's any reflection on the NFL as a whole, it's only that owners and general managers aren't especially circumspect in evaluating the personal standards of comportment of the individuals to whom they offer contracts.
Other:
Sure the NFL conducts background checks. By conducting them, presumably they discover what "skeletons" a potential recruit has in his closet. So what? If they conduct the background check, discover the person's story, and then decide they are okay with it, what's the point? Besides, they are conducting checks on people who, for the most part, are recent college grads. (assuming the candidate graduated) For the great many of them, just what is going to be in their background that's indicative of a pattern of much of anything other than youthful poor decision making of various types?
Back in the early days of football, sure, having a college degree meant one in all likelihood came from a "respectable" segment of society and thus received a good deal of "breeding" in one's formative years. That's just not the case these days. For many professional sports players, college experience is relevant only as a way for recruiters to gauge their potential ability as professional players. It lets the team owners and managers determine how to craft the team that will generate maximum revenue, not maximum honorable, sporting play. I'm not even sure that, on the whole, the majority of top draft picks in any professional sports league are particularly high academic achievers who've demonstrated keen critical thinking skills while they are in college.
Really? Eight 2014 first round offensive players in the NFL's draft had grades of a B- or better. It's even worse with the defense. You'll note that some players actually had grades of D and F. Darqueze Dennard earned (can you even use that term?) a D from Michigan State and Dee Ford ended college with a D average at Auburn. Will either school, any school, actually give one a degree after having finished with a D average? Can they even be considered college graduates?
(Auburn definitely surprised me. I thought they are considered to be a reasonably decent school. -- http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandre...niversity-1009 . Ditto Michigan State: http://www.shanghairanking.com/World...niversity.html
Note: I'm not seeking to quibble over what shcool's academic programs are better than another's. If the school is even mentioned on someone's list of top universities, I figure that a student graduating from the school with a 3.5 or better is a bright person and has developed sufficient enough skills and knowledge in some area of study.)
Now think and say what you will, but the fact is that I don't know of one non-sports/entertainment track career whereby a person graduating with less than a 3.5 can reasonably expect to have an outstanding chance at earning even $200K/year salaries within their first five years of graduating. Certainly in my field, management consulting, the top firms that will pay that much aren't very likely to hire such graduating student with less than a 3.5, although, yes, sometimes we do hire one or two having 3.2 or 3.3 overall averages, if their in-major grades are dramatically higher, generally 4.0 is expected in such cases. (The competition among MBA grads is even stiffer, for as a a grad student there really are only two overall letter grades permitted for graduation: A or B (3.0 or higher).) Ditto other highly paid fields like medicine, law, investment banking, engineering, and so on.
Now it's not so much that I think one need be a genius, but developing the strong critical thinking skills needed to graduate with honors from a reasonably decent college/university will absolutely help a person make better choices when it comes to whether or not they just do downright stupid and unconscionable things. I think that's even more so if the person comes from challenging circumstances that didn't afford him with parents who effectively taught him right from wrong.
What am I talking about with that last set of statements? Consider this. A couple years back, I was watching my youngest son playing a computer game. He was doing horribly at one point of the game (an FPS game). I suggested he might want to check on the WWW for some hints. Now what he boy said to me was that he knew about the cheats on the WWW but that was cheating and he didn't want to win that way. That was his response regarding a computer game he was playing by himself with no opponent other than a computer. IMO, that was the right answer. (It took him several hours to figure out how to get past that point in the game.)
So many folks think that money is "everything" and the fast and "easy" way to riches is the right way to go. They are just wrong, wrong on so many levels.
All the best.