Dave Hyde: The sad truth about Dolphins' Bullygate scandal finally comes out

It was always the worst kind of lie: One that was convenient and believable; one NFL lawyers could sell to move on; one Miami Dolphins officials signed off on for added public credibility; and one that after more than a decade of damaging lives can officially be called the lie it was all along.

“I never believed for a second I was being bullied,” Jonathan Martin told ESPN.

The saddest chapter in Dolphins history keeps getting sadder. Martin could have said this at the start of Bullygate in 2014 and ended it. He could have told NFL investigator Ted Wells and changed the conclusion the league was bent on making.

Martin could have told Dolphins owner Steve Ross and saved several good careers — teammates, coaches and good support staff like trainer Kevin O’Neill, who was named the NFL trainer of the year by peers even as he was being fired apparently for not cooperating more with a league investigation that showed he tried to help all players involved.

“It’s a story I’ve been trying to fix for 10 years,” Martin said.

What? How? Where was he trying? Who was he talking to?

“Well … well … well,’’ said Richie Incognito, the heretofore bully of Bullygate, on social media Sunday while posting a story of Martin admitting the truth.

Bullygate ruined a season and several good men’s careers, but had more emotional complexity at its center than the simpleton ideas delivered at its conclusion.

That previous sentence isn’t some new thought. I wrote it years ago in Bullygate’s aftermath. It didn’t take great insight to conclude it wasn’t as Simple Simon as one player, Incognito, being the bad, overbearing meathead and the other, Martin, being the poor, naive victim.

It just took listening to those involved and understanding the locker-room culture. NFL lawyers like Wells were too interested in serving a convenient target like Incognito on a public platter to stop all the ugliness for the league.

His 144-page report failed so many. The Dolphins also failed mightily. Ross surrendered the investigation from the start to the league rather than doing some work himself. That always would have been the better way to go for his employees.

There was a bully in Bullygate, though. That’s obvious now. It was the league and the Dolphins for embracing a lie that changed the football careers and full lives of people who couldn’t fight back from Incognito to O’Neill to offensive line coach Jim Turner. They lost jobs. Players like John Jerry and Mike Pouncey and other support staff had reputations changed by being mentioned in various ways in the Wells Report.

Coach Joe Philbin was forever asked that season why he didn’t have control of his locker room. There was truth in that. But the larger truth regarding Bullygate is it was never a story about bullying, racial taunting, awful locker-room culture or a coach’s indiscretion, all of which became the pop-psychology conclusion in the moment.

Nolan Carroll, a safety on that team, mentioned the careers affected by Bullygate on Sunday and wrote on social media of Martin: “I remember when he was crying leaving the locker room because he wasn’t playing good and didn’t bother to work himself out of a hole. He just ran like a coward! Admitting this (lie) does nothing. I never respected him, never will.”

That was the prevailing idea inside the Dolphins from the start. There’s another way to see this that has come out through the years.

Incognito and Martin might have been on opposite sides of emotional spectrums, one loud and coarse and the other quiet and sensitive. But they’re victims in different manners, too, no matter how few want to see Martin as one today.

Martin, like Incognito, suffered mental-health issues. Incognito was public about his problems. Martin’s issues blindsided coaches and staff in the aftermath of Bullygate in ways they wished they’d known. Martin dropped out of football and the news cycle after football until an alarming social-media post in 2018.

“When you’re a bully victim & a coward, your options are suicide, or revenge,” he wrote with the picture of a shotgun while also mentioning Incognito, Pouncey and his high school, Harvard-Westlake School.

He hospitalized himself in that aftermath. He went on to do financial work centering on Cryptocurrency, as the ESPN story says.

Incognito was suspended eight games that became a lost year of football before having three Pro Bowl seasons in Buffalo and with the Oakland Raiders. Bullygate never ended for him, though. Sure, he made mistakes inside the team back then. He did. But he hit the target best Sunday when he wrote of the Wells Report:

“A bunch of lawyers came in and tried to understand the culture of an NFL locker room. They made a mountain out of a mole hill while being directed by Martin’s parents. The report crushed us both! The lawyers wanted to protect the NFL and the Dolphins. They didn’t give two s—- to fact check any of the wild claims made by Martin and his camp. They took everything I said and used it against me. I was trying to tell the truth.”

Martin, saying it was all a lie from the start, can’t walk back a decade of consequences. It just injects a truth that was there to see all along.

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