by Michael Rosenberg

Updated: May 12, 2008, 5:26 PM EST 488 comments

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No suspension for Bill Belichick? No smoking gun? No video of Tom Brady whipping out his iPod Touch in the huddle and watching a YouTube clip of some defensive coach's signals?

The scandal known as Spygate is about to conclude. Actually, that's not right. It concluded months ago, with the New England Patriots paying a big fine and losing a first-round pick. We just didn't know it was done at the time.

At the time, we are told, Belichick admitted to commissioner Roger Goodell that he had recorded opposing coaches' signals for years.

Goodell levied his punishment, with the understanding that if anything else surfaced, the Pats could get in trouble again. Nothing else of substance has surfaced.

Former Patriots employee Matt Walsh was supposedly going to spill the beans, but as it turns out, they were old beans. Goodell had seen those beans already.

This is all fine and good, except for one thing: Goodell's punishment was not strong enough in the first place.

A coach admits to cheating for several years, during which time he won three Super Bowls, and he isn't even suspended?

I don't get it. I'm not saying Belichick should have been suspended for life, or even a full season. But what he did was wrong and clearly against the rules, and he should have paid a stiffer price.

He should have suffered the embarrassment of suspension by his beloved NFL.

Goodell made one other decision — back when this ended before we knew it — that still baffles me. He destroyed the tapes the Patriots had turned over. Seriously, I thought we all stopped destroying tapes around 1974. You can't win by doing that. It arouses way too much suspicion.

Why did Goodell destroy the tapes?

"It was the best way to make sure the Patriots followed my instructions," he said at his state of the league address. "I wanted to make sure that bit of information did not appear."

What bit of information? I actually doubt that there was more damaging information on there. I suspect Goodell just didn't want to suffer embarrassment of a different kind. According to FOX Sports' own Jay Glazer, who acquired copies of the tapes in the reporting scoop of the NFL season, the videotaper kept swerving over to record shots of attractive women in the stands.

Imagine that playing in front of Congress.

So maybe that was it. I don't know. But I leave this whole thing with a feeling that the Patriots got away with something.

Yes, they were embarrassed. Yes, their reputation got damaged. But ask yourself this:

If you gave other coaches the chance to record opposing teams' offensive and defensive signals during games for an eight-year period, and at the end they would lose a first-round pick and their teams would get fined, would they say it was worth it?

I think almost every coach in that league would say yes. This is a huge advantage. And that's why the punishment did not fit the crime.

(One side note on the punishment: some people, including a few I greatly respect, have said that taking away the Patriots' first-round pick is not such a big deal because they already had the 49ers' pick, which was in the top 10. I don't understand that line of thinking. Is Goodell supposed to punish the Patriots more because they made a good trade with San Francisco? That's crazy. Do you give a bank robber more jail time because he invested his legitimate earnings wisely? I don't get it.)

Goodell is the law-and-order commissioner. Hey, every commish has to be something. Pete Rozelle was the let's-make-this-huge-with-the-help-of-TV commissioner. Paul Tagliabue was the new-stadiums commissioner.

So Goodell had to be something. And he couldn't really promise to make the owners billionaires, because many of them are already billionaires — or will be in a few years, no matter what Goodell does. He couldn't promise peace (and prosperity) with the union, because the league has had labor peace for two decades, and nobody knows if it will last.

He could have promised teams overseas. But that's a lot harder to accomplish than people think. The world may be flat, but it still has time zones and requires air travel.

Law and order made sense. The NFL has always been firmly in order's camp but not so fond of the law. Somebody needed to keep this from becoming the Pacman Jones Era, and it sure wasn't going to be the teams. So Goodell stepped in and started acting like he was getting paid by the suspension.

Most of what he did (suspending Pacman, for example) was warranted. Finally, somebody was going to show that you could run a successful sport without condoning criminal acts.

He has done that. He might yet be as great a commissioner as the legendary Rozelle. But on this one, the law-and-order commissioner did not come down hard enough.

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