Deflategate has now progressed to the "please make it go away" point of its news cycle. Hysterical hot takes like this and this have crossed over into the realm of unintentional comedy. People who did not watch the game (or any other game this season, for that matter) now believe that they are qualified to comment on events that did not affect their lives in any meaningful way.
Allow me to preface my remarks by saying that I am a dyed in the wool Buffalo Bills fan. I laughed heartily after the Helmet Catch and believe that Eli Manning besting Tom Brady in two different Super Bowls is one of the best jokes that the cosmos has ever decided to play on us. I would love nothing more than to see them fail miserably on the biggest stage possible after watching them beat the Bills like a drum for the entirety of Tom Brady's career.
This is not that failure. The NFL's arcane and senseless rule structure that led to the Dez Bryant catch being waved off is to blame. What most of the shrieking masses do not know is that the NFL allows teams to keep their own balls for offensive usage. A petition was circulated by Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and other top flight QBs back in 2006 asking for permission to do so and it was granted by the NFL
Professional athletes are competitive by nature. No one rises to the highest levels unless they are searching for every edge to exploit. By all accounts, Tom Brady eats, sleeps, and breathes the game of football. Does the fact that he prefers a football that is easier to grip take away from his relentless passion for film/playbook study and his relentless off season training regimen? Aaron Rodgers has gone on record as saying he prefers an over inflated ball.
Yet no one is howling in the streets, trying to strip Green Bay of their draft picks. Ball doctoring is one of the dirty secrets of the NFL, much like the MLB. Success breeds hatred and the Patriots' unprecedented run of success causes people to lose their minds when they have a chance of uncovering any blemish on that legacy.
Let's compare Deflategate to a situation where another storied franchise cheated in a manner that was much more visible to the naked eye, to a much smaller outcry from the public. Mike Tomlin, coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, another franchise that prides themselves on "doing things the right way", tripped a Baltimore Raven as they broke into the clear up the sideline, stopping a certain touchdown in a key divisional game.
Have we continued to hear about this for years and years? No. Is it even mentioned anymore? No. Do people try to say that Tomlin didn't mean to do it? You bet. Now imagine if Bill Belichick was ever involved in an incident of that magnitude. The sheer amount of hot takes would provide enough heat to keep all of our homes warm this winter.
Lastly, it's a shame to see such a non issue take away from the fact that the Patriots have owned the Colts since they drafted Andrew Luck and would have beaten them playing with beach balls. Luck has never played a game against Tom Brady that was decided by less than three touchdowns. 2012: 59-24. 2014 playoffs: 43-22. 2014 regular season: 42-20. Last week's AFC Championship Game: 45-7. Enough said.
One of the worst cases of “cheating” was during the ice bowl when Dallas played Green Bay. It was reported that Vince Lombardi (probably the greatest coach to play the game at that time) had all of Dallas’s heaters turned off during the game both in and out of the locker room. But, we wouldn’t want to say anything about vince. He’s a legend.
Get over it. It’s football.
this is no chesting is saving energy, the energy don t play, ball yes
Exactly, cuauhtemoc perez, you took the words right from my mouth!
I just find it hilarious that the Colts have been unable to mount any challenge the last 3-4 times they’ve played New England. Anyone who watched that game and thought the Colts were a few underinflated balls away from a Super Bowl is delusional.
The fact that they suck so bad is why I had their team picture tattooed across my hairy back!
They break the rules and they get caught, they get penalized. Otherwise, why bother having the damned rules in the first place?
Agreed! It’s not whether or not the Colts would have lost anyway. It’s that 11 out of 12 balls were found to be underinflated. If they’ve been doing it all along and gotten away with it until now, that makes it all the more egregious.
Don’t listen to my wife, she is an idiot
Because the rules are silly and make no real sense. If you’re going to allow the offensive team to keep their own balls, then this is what will happen. When Brady, Manning, etc. circulated the petition 9 years ago, the NFL should have kept it from going through, since apparently everyone all of a sudden cares so much. I personally could give less of a crap. Anyone can doctor a ball, but only the top QBs can make the throws necessary to win.
You are a dye in the wool Buffalo Bills fan. At least that is what you say, but hey you sound like a Patriots fan. No team and I mean no team is exempt from following the rules. Why do both teams have their own footballs? Why can’t the referees be in charge of the balls? This would have never happened if that was the case. How do we not know that the Patriots won other games by deflating their game balls? We don’t! I believe they should be penalized to max for what they did, no matter what the score was.
Don’t listen to my wife, she is an idiot
In fact, if it wasn’t for her removable teeth, I would have left her years ago.
So, you start off your comment by essentially calling me a liar. Great start. How many former QBs have to come out and say that this isn’t a big deal before people stop bellyaching? People like to believe that they are privy to how the game really works. Spoiler alert: we aren’t.
Mike Tomlin TRIPPED a player as he was streaking down the sideline for a TD and that didn’t seem to upset people nearly as much as this. If you think that penalizing a team for something as inane as this when Tomlin was not punished for his actions is the correct course of action, you’re welcome to think it.
The Patriots have beaten the Colts like a rented mule every time they’ve played since Andrew Luck came aboard. It had absolutely no impact on the game’s outcome.
This is the first time someone has mentioned the Mike Tomlin incident. I’ve been talking about that since the whole deflated football controversy started. I think the big difference is, that was visible to everyone, Tomlin apologized publicly, and paid a pretty heavy fine — I think it was $100,000. Still, some in Baltimore think it was done on purpose and that Jacoby could’ve gotten a touchdown. Unclear. Of course, I’d have loved to have seen Tomlin suspended! But again, it was actually deemed an “accident”.
Again, don’t listen to my wife, she is an idiot, obviously. Thanks for being patient with her.
I also read somewhere that Bill Belichek was a founding member of ISIS and Tom Brady doesn’t like fat girls. How can the league let these guys go to the Superbowl?
I guess you can tell that my wife is fat.
That’s what kills me about this whole brouhaha. Tomlin did what he did in plain view of the public, in a way that definitely could have affected the outcome. I’m not a Patriots fan, but none of us can say that a deflated ball would have caused the Colts to lose. When you lose by 38 points, you lose the right to blame the inflation of the football.
It never mattered. They would have had to make a decision with hours or 2 days at most to stop the ball rolling. The NFL has too much money on the line as does everyone involved. The hundreds of hotel reservations, plane tickets and other commitments to be made would not allow this to be more then news headlines.
What’s different between deflating footballs so they’re easier to grip/less likely to fumble and a cyclist doping?
In the case of the cyclist a claim could be made that since it was so prevalent in the sport, the only way to compete was to become the best at it. He was. He was stripped of his 7 Tour De France wins when it was determined that, even though everyone did, he admitted to cheating.
In the case of the Patriots, you have a team that not only doesn’t mind cheating, they thrive on it. They cheated when they taped other teams practices. When Josh McDaniels was Denver’s head coach, Denver made the right move and fired him, thus delivering the message Denver doesn’t cheat! New England abruptly hired this cheater back and welcomed him back into their cheating fold. Now they get caught again, this time with deflated footballs. Brady now reminds me a lot of Lance Armstrong. Armstrong was VERY convincing in his ‘I’m innocent’ defense. He never did test positive on a drug test – making his defense all that more likely to be correct, but he cheated and was stripped of his titles. New England cheats, but now nobody cares? Sure, New England would have beaten Indy that game? But can you say if Armstrong didn’t cheat he wouldn’t have won 1 or 2 Tours? Doesn’t matter. He cheated, they took away his wins. Since the rule was changed in 96 to allow quarterbacks to provide footballs, how many times has New England tried and gotten away with cheating?
If you’re a New England fan, I feel bad for you. You deserve a team with more integrity than what you have. I used to support Lance Armstrong with every fiber of my being and when he admitted he cheated, I felt betrayed to my core. You’re team is cheating, yet none of you feel betrayed. Shame on you. Shame on anyone who condones cheating or brushes it aside like it’s no big deal. If it’s no big deal, then why do it? If you’re good enough to win without it – why do it? Maybe the answer is they aren’t good enough to win without cheating. Bellicheck, McDaniels – they were caught cheating and got a slap on the wrist. Armstrong got caught cheating and they buried him. If the NFL wants to condone this behavior, that’s their bag, but if they won’t protect the integrity of their own game, then they are as guilty as cycling used to be when it looked the other way at doping. They are as guilty as Major League Baseball for looking the other way while players juiced. MLB still hasn’t recovered from that dark period and might never, but at least they finally decided a clean game was better for the sport than allowing cheaters to turn their sport into a circus.
“Cheating” is heavily ingrained in every sport. It is interesting that you chose not to compare Apples to apples when talking about doping in cycling. PED use in football is not considered a major deal and a team would NEVER get wins taken away for players using them. Every team in the NFL cheats. Team doctors rush medical protocols, prescribe unnecessary drugs to enhance recovery and performance, develop ways to get away with penalties, sabotage other teams headphones and mics, tampering with players (Jets) and the latest being the accusation that the Falcons were illegally enhancing crowd noise. Technically they are breaking rules, but if everyone does similar things to get an advantage it should be no more then a slap on the wrist (How pissed would you be if you gt pulled over for going 47 in a 45 mph zone). It is still unclear how common it is to alter balls illegally, but it seams like it may be something teams have gotten away with for years. If the league want to change the culture of the league then they need to write new rules, but by passing the petition for QBs to get the balls before the game clearly shows that they never thought that this was a big deal.
The integrity of the game has not been attacked. Fine them 500k and a 2nd round pick and move on.
Don’t listen to Slash, he suffered a traumatic brain injury on our honeymoon
So if the Patriots are cheaters, how did they manage to beat the Seahawks? Again, I don’t like the Patriots, but you can’t take away from what Tom Brady did last night.
Cheating is cheating, and yes it makes a difference. Anyone who sits there and says numnuts stuff like “it’s football” blah blah blah, is full of shite. You tell that to YOUR kids when another team cheats and wins…yeah, thought so, you will be the first to say “IT IS WRONG TO CHEAT” period.
the fact remains that the Patriots do not have enough balls to win on their own. They have deflated balls…that is for sure.
My client, jujubean is a struggling comedian. Notice the funny name and equally funny use of the word shite. He does his act with a phony cockney accent and let me tell you, it is hysterical. Please come out and see him when he plays at your local Lions Club luncheon.
I’ll go out on a limb and assume that you do not win 4 Super Bowls by cheating. And I’ll also believe the large numbers of QBs and people around football who have all come out and said that this is no big deal. If your kids are honestly looking up to NFL players as their role models, you’ve failed as a parent. They should be looking to you for guidance, not Tom freaking Brady.
As a child, I idolized Allen Iverson, even though he was known to have severe personal issues and wasn’t the greatest of people. Even my little pea brain knew that he was someone to enjoy watching play basketball, not someone to pattern my life after.
The NFL allows teams to keep their own balls for offense, a rule that was petitioned through by Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and several other high profile QBs. So you can sit there and pretend it is just New England that participates in this practice, or open your eyes and realize that this is clearly widespread.
Is it a stupid rule that leaves the door open for controversies just like this one? You betcha. But expecting teams and athletes to be competitive enough to try to win the game without ever bending a rule is silly and I won’t waste my time condemning a team for something this asinine.
Unfortunately, my client is unable to have children as a result of an injury suffered during a game of flag football with his sisters.
Thank you to Tyler for talking sense. No one cries about cheating when players are clearly on PEDs. The Ravens, who were the 1st team to start bellyaching about the Patriots, didn’t seem to have a problem with cheating when Terrell Suggs and Ray Lewis both used PEDs to cut the recovery time for their injuries in half, leading to a Super Bowl victory. I didn’t care about that and I don’t care about this. We love our football, but we don’t like to deal with the harsh reality that some of these guys aren’t the most honest people or the best citizens.
I get it, people don’t like the Patriots and I don’t, either. But they have my respect because they have been a great football team for 15 years in a league where it’s nearly impossible to keep a good squad together for more than 2-3 years.