I *could *go to thesaurus.com and condescend to you a little more with some more grownup-level synonyms. But it’s easier just to keep it on your level from the beginning, isn’t it?
Since this is not a legal case, Brady doesn’t have all the rights he would in court. He can certainly refuse to turn stuff over but then they can use that against him.
The NCAA has a lot of problems but they also make a big deal about people lying to them. Sometimes they have harsher sanctions than if the people just admitted what they did wrong.
So I’ve been rewatching old Simpsons episodes. Just got to season 16 today. From S16/2005, Tom Brady guest stars and says, in response to Homer: “But I like to stand for good sportsmanship.”
I think Brady should get detention. Not just 1 day, at least 2 to teach him a lesson.
I will forever call the NE football club “The Deflatriots.”
Pats lose first rounder in 2016, 4th in 2017, Brady suspended for 4 games, and team fined a million.
Pretty harsh.
A million dollar fine? Chicken Feed.
Yeah, the money is nothing, and people were expecting a 2-8 game suspension, but a first round pick is out of the blue and a very severe punishment.
I would bet that investigative report cost the NFL more than $1M. Given that N.E. picks near the end of Round One every year, I don’t know that they’re losing sleep over a lost pick. But, it’s relatively severe for a stupid violation that probably didn’t change the course of any game. I imagine like most transgressions, it’s the cover up that gets you.
Questions that occur to me:
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Are the penalties enhanced because of previous incidents? Seems like New England lost a draft pick over the videogate thing, too…
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Are penalties enhanced because it happened in the playoffs? I kinda doubt anybody gets suspended if it happens in the last pre-season game.
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Will Brady’s eventual HoF status be affected? I think he’s a lock for the Hall, but could this keep him out on his first ballot?
To question one above:
If I try to rob a bank, I’m accountable for the crime whether the robbery succeeds or not.
I find it hard to believe that most of the people commentating (not in this thread, but in the sports press) have read the report, except to extract juicy details. All of the parts ‘implicating’ Brady are in the form of “Here’s an ambiguous text message, here’s what the people who sent and received the text message told us it was about, we don’t find that credible, we think it is a clear reference to our preconceived notion of what happened”.
Even when they say “We don’t think the explanation they gave us is credible, for reasons we will explain below” they don’t actually provide reasons, they just assert that the texts have particular meanings.
It’s ambiguously evidenced what the actual state of the balls was, because both the gauges and the recording of pressures were unreliable. Rather than stack these uncertainties, they’ve tried to “correct” for them. This is fine if you’re trying to establish a pre-determined conclusion, but not if you’re trying to work out the range of possibilities. Take the treatment of the post-game data for example. They’ve rejected it because it doesn’t match any of the versions of what happened, instead of accepting that it shows just how variable the data collection was.
As a work of forensic investigation, the report is incredibly low quality. Full of conclusions which are suppositions. It is clear from the report that is that it is certainly possible for any team, including the Patriots, to tamper with the balls without leaving any evidence trail. It’s fairly well evidenced that Brady was concerned and frustrated that the balls were getting over-inflated. It’s a reasonable conclusion (but by no means certain) that the balls were under-inflated at half time.
There’s a plausible line to draw between all these things, and I wouldn’t blame any football fan for drawing that line. It’s hardly a smoking gun, particularly when it comes to implicating any individual.
Only if you, like Tom Brady, gets caught…
There’s very little ambiguity in the text messages. One has to look at them with a total Patriot-homer eye to fail to see the obvious.
Similarly, hand-waving away the comprehensive analysis, which gives a shitload of consideration to alternative hypotheses, is just stupid. Only in New England does the conspiracy story hold up. “Oh, the league hates us and the independent lab was out to get us too!”
The conspiracy against the Patriots by the NFL is one of the funnier aspects of it. “Oh, sure, those investigators found evidence, but they were employed by the NFL, who obviously has an interest in tarring their own reputation by casting a shadow over their most recent superbowl winner and one of their biggest franchises, so obviously it’s a witchhunt”
This is the NFL that burned the spygate tapes and hushed up the results of the whole thing.
The idea that the NFL wants this controversy, and is creating it out of nowhere, especially against a franchise owned by a powerful owner, who is probably the most known team right now for recent success, and is wildly popular, in order to conduct a witch hunt to create a result that only hurts their image is pretty dumb even among conspiracy theories.
Yes, the Ray Rice suspension for beating his wife, with clear video evidence - only *two *games. :rolleyes: Goodell’s been scrambling to try to recover his credibility ever since. Unfortunately, following the guidance of the New York Daily News front page to decide one’s course of action doesn’t do that.
If you’re referring to the filming incident, that was long ago and penalties were already assessed against the personnel involved. Yet the league is explicitly using that as a basis for even more penalties, against different people, for it being “more probable than not of them being generally aware”, and not including any issue with lax control by league officials themselves. That would have trouble standing up in the court case that is inevitably going to follow if Goodell doesn’t soon realize he’s blundered again.
Still, the hate campaign is going to continue nevertheless. The New York-centered national sports media will see to it.
Yes, local media today is reporting that the report flat out states that the punishment is harsh because of past actions of the Patriots such as spygate. This is unprecedented from what I’m hearing.
The really interesting thing to me about this that nobody seems to be talking about is that this was a sting. The Colts heard Brady likes less inflated balls. They went and tattled to the NFL, who let the game play for one half and then tried to catch the Pats doing something wrong by measuring the balls at halftime.
They fucked this thing up many ways. They used different needles for measuring before and after the half. They didn’t measure all the balls of the Colts because they ran out of time. The NFL has proven time and time again that they are really incompetent at investigating anything.
But the interesting part is that the game didn’t go the way they wanted it to. The Pats played badly during the first half with the less inflated balls. They played brilliantly in the second half using 16 lbs full balls that the refs provided. That completely goes against the narrative that this sting operation was trying to set up.
Imagine if the game went the other way… If the Pats scored 35 unanswered points during the first half and they played poorly during the second half then all the Patriots haters would be screaming at the top of their lungs that the air pressure in the footballs was the reason.
Oh god, are you joining the “hater” train too? You were actually spewing stuff that made a reasonable amount of sense up until that point.
Is there a better word to use?
Lots of people hate the Pats. Lots of people are happy to see them fail. It’s human nature, unfortunately. Many people like to see the mighty fall.