Shed no tears for Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.

Brady, the star quarterback of the National Football League team, announced on Friday that he will discontinue his fight against the decision by the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, to suspend the player for four games.

As every Patriots fan and small child knows, the suspension was handed down by the because of an NFL "investigation" that found Brady was said to be at least "generally aware" that some footballs the Patriots used in their AFC championship game over the Indianapolis Colts had allegedly been deflated by team personnel to below league specifications.

Those footballs, of course, were hardly decisive in the Patriots’ 45-7 victory over the Colts. In fact, the "investigation" found that the deflated balls – if they existed at all – were used only in the first half. The score at halftime, for those who have forgotten, was 17-7.

There’s no telling what the score might have been had the balls been fully inflated, but it brings to mind the story about legendary Washington quarterback Sammy Baugh, the only player to lead the league in passing, punting and defensive interceptions in different seasons (he also played defensive back in the era of two-way players.)

Baugh, whose team lost the 1940 NFL championship game to the Chicago Bears by a score of 73-0 – still the most lopsided game in league history – was asked after the game whether it would have been a different game had not one of his receivers dropped a sure touchdown pass early in the game.

"Sure," Baugh is said to have said. "The final score would have been 73-7."

It will remain one of the enduring mysteries of sports why the NFL commissioner chose to throw the book at one of the sport’s most iconic figures using the flimsiest of "evidence." The four-game suspension Brady will now serve is roughly equivalent to a motorist getting a jail sentence for rolling through a stop sign on a deserted street at 2 a.m. The transgression itself, if there even was one, was inconsequential.

At the heart of Brady’s legal case was the NFL’s system of punishment and appeals. The commissioner both hands out the punishment and hears the appeals, which hardly seems fair. But were the issue about fairness, Brady never would have dropped his case.

After losing in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Brady could have taken his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that would have been the ultimate Hail Mary pass. The problem is not that the system isn’t broken, but that it’s the one NFL players agreed to through the collective-bargaining process. Courts are historically reluctant to overturn such agreements.

So Brady will sit out the first quarter of the 2016 season, but fans of the team have little to fear. As great as Brady has been – and he is clearly one of the two or three best quarterbacks in league history – the Patriots have never been about just one player. The biggest difference between the Patriots of the Bill Belichick era and the bad old days when the Patriots were masters at snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory is that the Patriots rarely beat themselves, regardless of who’s on the field.