A more apt penalty is to forfeit the game.
Why? The Commissioner said that the Pats gained no advantage that game that helped them in any way. The Jets should get a Mulligan for not being able to cover Randy Moss? He had three guys on him and still scored a big TD. And, the NY Daily News is now talking about Mangini having worked for the Pats in the past and if taping was a common practice he not only knew about it but used the film in his game prep as a Pats coordinator. Hard for him to be righteous about this.
Losing a #1 for an in game infraction that didn’t impact that particular game is pretty big. The Pats are losing someone with the talent of Ben Watson or Logan Mankins as punishment. If Goodall could prove that BB had bugged the locker room or had found some way to cheat that directly impacted the game being played then BB would likely have been suspended.
Forfeiture was never going to happen and everybody thinking it would is just being silly. The NFL has never changed the past, not once. Not when admitting their own officials screwed up, not when finding out players or coaches did bad things, not even when they started tracking a stat they hadn’t tracked before (ask Deacon Jones who actually owns the sack record). There was simply no way they were going to start doing that now, that’s a path that once you start on you can’t leave, so the past is set in stone no matter what we learn about it in the future.