So how long until the first t-shirt/bumper sticker (or, I guess, these days, reddit):
** NFL PLAYERS DO IT WITH LIMP BALLS**
or
** PATRIOTS DO IT WITH SHRUNKEN BALLS**
?
Maybe they should field a team in NASCAR.
It does give me something to pleasantly snark at all the dimestore Pats fans around me.
This is similar to what I’m reading in Football MBs.
IMHO: Sure, everyone cheats, I get that. But the Pats have made it so that whenever anything, no matter how relevant, comes out about their own possible cheating issues, then you have to wonder what else have they done that they didn’t get caught for.
A shame, really, because that coach is indeed a great coach. The players they have had during his tenure have been outstanding. But, everyone except for rabid Pats homers will always think about the cheating scandals when thinking about the Brady/Belichick era.
The Ravens whining about the in/eligible receiver stuff was just sour grapes, tho. That wasn’t cheating, just smarter football.
But - and I mean this without judgement - I think that’s because you’re predisposed to not respect them.
Look, I’m far from a Patriots fan, let alone a rabid Pats homer; I’m a Giants’ fan, in fact, so the pain of New England has been like little drops of chocolate for me on at least two memorable Sundays in recent memory.
And from my perspective, the following chain of things seems incredibly obvious:
- The Patriots make a sustained and deliberate effort to cheat all the time; but
- So does every other team in football - to exactly the same degree; and therefore
- My own personal impression of the Brady-Belichick era is not changed one iota by the Patriots efforts to cheat, because I firmly believe that they are not at all exceptional in this way; but unfortunately
- Some of the key guys in the Patriots organization - notably the coach and the QB - are either moody dicks or just kind of amorphously unlikeable, which makes people root against the team and want them to fail; this is compounded by the fact that
- They almost never fail, which can make people root against you in and of itself (cf, The New York Yankees, against whom I root on general principle); so as a result,
- People who are annoyed by the success of the Patriots and find them dislikable are inclined to take this oh so shocking evidence that New England cheats as much as anyone else and use it to discount or make weird statements about the Patriots’ success. This is understandable because it makes a fan of, like, the Jets or the Vikings feel better - you can pretend that the Patriots have enjoyed unprecedented success because they cheat (that fan’s team does, too, in similar ways and to similar degree, but they didn’t get caught, so that fan can disingenuously pretend that they don’t). The alternative is admitting that the Patriots have just been better run and employed better players than every other franchise in the NFL in the last decade and a half… and some fans don’t want to do that.
TLDR: This is stupid. The Patriots are doing the same shit as everyone else. They’re the NFL’s best franchise since the nineties (trailed closely by the Steelers and Giants IMO), and everyone should just pull on their big boy pants and accept it, period, full stop.
YMMV, but that’s cool.
“Hi, I’m Eli Manning. I don’t always win the Superbowl. But when I do, I beat the Patriots.” 
This faiuls on point 2, no everyone **DOESN’T **do it. We like to say that to justify things. Do more teams than the Patriots do it? Sure, probably, they should get smacked too. The Patriots however, abuse the ticky tack shit that other teams may trry to pull here and there.
Maybe the Cardinals, use under inflated balls or the Packers use overinflated balls in a key game. Maybe the Jets or the Rams videotape practices or walkthroughs once in a while. Smack them all down. The Patriots, however, are involved in ALL of it and do it consistently.
A lot of folks take a penny or two from the “give a penny, take a penny” dish. The Patriots however, empty that fucker in to their pockets everytime they buy a pack of smokes and then look around innocently wide eyed and say “What? Everyone does it and there is no real rule about how much we can take or give.”.
Of course I am. But that’s because of their history, not any irrational animus toward Brady (whom I like), Bellicheck (whom I have a high opinion on his football coaching abilities) or Bob Kraft (who amuses me). I’m predisposed to dislike them because they’ve pulled this kind of shit before.
See, that’s where you lose me. I try to base my determinations on evidence. I don’t doubt other teams cheat too, just look at Bountygate with the Saints, but I haven’t seen evidence that “everyone else is doing it”. Maybe Aaron Rodgers re-inflates the balls during games after they’re checked by the refs, and if he did, I would lose respect for him also. And if he continues to find other ways to cheat over and over, then yes, I’d put him up there with the Patriots.
We hear the same “everybody else is doing it” every time a team, especially the Patriots, get caught. Yet, somehow by some miracle, the NFL hasn’t taken action against other teams for videotaping signals or offering money to injure players like the Saints. Saying “everyone is doing it” and actually proving it are two different things. We should wait until the evidence against the Patriots comes out, of course, but there is no way they should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Which is what’s said about juicing and so forth in baseball, and the tech cheating in NASCAR, and so forth.
Does it go on pretty much nonstop? Probably. Do the “best” teams do it as much as those struggling? Sure. Are a lot of the cheats pure voodoo or otherwise irrelevant (e.g., steroids did not make Barry Bonds such a deadly fielder or raise his batting average overall)? Of course.
Does that mean they’re okay, or fans should just suck it up?
No.
If sports - pro especially - aren’t always struggling to keep the game as fair and level as possible, they are worse than meaningless. They’re just WWF wrestling.
ETA: Especially in NFL, which as many have pointed out is absolutely smothered in pointless minutiae-rules designed primarily to preserve televised profitability and sponsorship bux. (Baseball’s only real counterpart: attempts to speed up pitching.) If they can get all hissy-pissy over spike colors, then things like letting teams have possession of the only relevant piece of equipment in the game is just effin’ absurd.
No, its just the patriots- they broke a rule 8 years ago, and they broke a rule last week, so clearly its a sustained ongoing effort to cheat in any way they can. If this had come out next year, it would be worse because it would show their sustained ongoing effort to be 9 years instead of 8.
[QUOTE=Hamlet]
As I said, I think this has been blown out of proportion and had no effect on the outcome of the game. Which does nothing to change the fact that, if true, it is yet more evidence that the Patriots are a bunch of cheating bastards who deserve absolutely no respect.
[/QUOTE]
Then as are every team that has broken a rule. Aaron Rodgers freely admitted, before the world decided it was something to give any shit about, that he intentionally overinflates footballs and tries to sneak them past the refs into the game- so the Packers are cheating bastards that deserve no respect. The 2 teams that were warned to stop heating footballs in a heater during a cold game because it was against the rules: cheating bastards that deserve no respect. Any team that has had a player suspended for PEDs (which is actually an egregious violation of rules that has a direct competetive advantage), all of those teams are cheating bastards that deserve no respect. Or you can cherry pick the team you already despise and convince yourself that they are the sole offenders in an otherwise holy league of compliant do-gooders. And while your at it convince yourself that because they broke a fairly obscure rule 8 years ago about videotaping sidelines which had until that year been perfectly legal, (and other coaches, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Cower on record saying it was done throughout the league anyway, Patriots didn’t devise this dirty little spying scheme - but yes, absolutety, if you get caught, then you get the fine), that must mean that they are an ongoing, deliberately cheating franchise like no other. Then lump in the clever ways they work within the rules and use that as further evidence that they must be ongoing cheaters. So then when this comes out 8 years later- a minor rules infraction (the fine listed in rulebook is $25k, less than Marshawn Lynch’s fine for not talking to the media) that other QB’s freely admit they do - that they haven’t even been proven guilty of yet anyway- then there you have it- Proof that they are always cheating in ways that no one else does
What he didn’t say was that after they were checked by the refs, he went ahead and had 11 out of 12 of them re-inflated and used them in games. And if he did, I would lose respect for him. And if he continued to do so over a period of years, getting caught and disciplined, then, yes, I’d put him on the same pedestal as the Patriots and Saints.
The ball inflation isn’t a big deal. It’s just an indication what kind of program the Patriots run. You can continue to claim they are no worse than any other team until you’re blue in the face (which appears to be on the upcoming horizon) if it makes you feel any better.
I’m counting 1, and then 8 years later this accusation that hasn’t even been proven yet- so eh, I guess you could call that a pattern, over and over. But then I’m guessing you already had your opinion that the Patriots were habitual cheaters before last week anyway, so curious what the “over and over” is?
We’ll see what the investigation reveals. Maybe it is all a mistake and the Patriots did absolutely nothing wrong. We will see.
You’re aware that the Patriots never videotaped any practices or walkthroughs, right?
Yes, I am… it was defensive signals… not really the point of the post though, is it?
I don’t know what the point of the post was. But if the point was to talk about things the Patriots have done, you might want to limit it to things the Patriots have done.
Again, I guess I have a different definitions of “consistently” then some people? They broke a rule 8 years ago, got fined. As noted the filming practices/walkthroughs bs was completely debunked. I’m thinking that the word consistently means “consistently”, can provide the examples of the consistent rule breaking you’re referring to?
1. I may have been unclear; I definitely don’t mean to suggest that teams that are caught breaking the rules oughtn’t to be punished. In fact, I strongly believe the opposite: that if you’re caught, you should be punished to the extent the rules permit. Having strong, clear, unequivocal penalties associated with these (IMO) minor infractions helps keep teams and individuals from even contemplating more serious forms of cheating that would cause actual harm to the integrity of the competition. If the Patriots are shown to have cheated deliberately here (though this might be a bit harder to prove then you’d expect), they should be penalized. If there’s already a mandated penalty for messing with game balls, apply it (multiply it by 11 if you really want to send a message). If there’s not, trust your commissioner to make a good judgment (of course, the fact that the NFL is in the middle of an experiment in having a hairy turd as their commissioner complicates this, but that’s another thread).
2. To those disputing my contention that all teams do things like this… well, perhaps you’re right and I’m wrong, but from my perspective that looks hopelessly naïve. Numerous inside football-type people went on record during Spygate to say that the Patriots’ filming practices were widespread in the NFL. Hamlet, your team’s QB is on record as saying that your team intentionally overinflates footballs past the NFL’s limit and “sees if the officials take the air out of it” (this suggests very strongly that at times the officials do not, allowing the Packers to knowingly play with out-of-spec balls. We’ve also seen very widespread use of PEDs [nearly every team], coaches tripping players and directing “human walls” to interfere with gunners on punt coverage[Jets], videotaping opponent practices[Broncos], numerous instancesof tampering[49ers, Lions, Dolphins, though the last was quite a long time ago], cheating the salary cap via illegal deferred compensation[Broncos again, which by the way gives them the same number of entries on this list as New England], and countless instances of misreporting injuries[Bills and Redskins here, but there are many others]. It took me literally ten minutes to find these. Everyone here was punished – as the Patriots should be, if they are found to have cheated – but my central point, the Patriots are not remotely exceptional in seeking advantages outside the rules stands.
It’d be useful to know what the New England equipment guys were doing during the game. It’s too bad nobody was filming their sideline.
http://www.si.com/nfl/2015/01/19/new-england-patriots-deflategate-bill-belichick-tom-brady
Again, as I keep repeating, it’s all elementary school style, ticky-tack, petty, “I’m not touching you” shit. I am sure everythign in that column will be hand waved scoffed or mocked, however, it’s the culture of the Patriots.
It’s not the sour grapes of “haters” or other teams’ fans. It’s the players and the coaches and executives of the league who are on to this stuff.