Elise Amendola/AP If Bill Belichick turns out to be a repeat offender, the punishment could reflect that. We are about to find out again with the Patriots where the National Football League thinks gamesmanship ends and actual cheating begins. We are going to find out how much having priors — and priors in this case means SpyGate — will factor into Roger Goodell’s sanctions, if there are sanctions against the Patriots, if it turns out they knowingly broke the rules about how much air belongs in footballs.
We are also about to find out just how angry Goodell, who has had his own problems this year, maybe you’ve heard, is about Super Bowl 49 being hijacked this way by either Bill Belichick or Tom Brady or both of them. Because if it is determined that Belichick was the one who cheated here, with SpyGate already on his record, you wonder how he doesn’t get away without some kind of suspension.
If Sean Payton got a year from Goodell for BountyGate, with no priors, what happens to Belichick, who has a record?
Of course if there had never been a SpyGate, then whatever happened with those footballs last Sunday in the AFC Championship Game would be treated like a misdemeanor and not a felony. But if the Patriots did get caught cheating again, the stakes will be raised, even if this seems like nothing more than doctoring footballs the way baseball pitchers have doctored baseballs from the beginning of time.
Alex Goodlett/Getty Images We'll find out if Roger Goodell is willing to throw the book at a team owned by his most vocal advocate, Robert Kraft of the Patriots. Are you surprised that a football coach would go looking for any kind of competitive edge? Don’t be. Bill Parcells tells the story about the late Bill Walsh, and a playoff game at Giants Stadium in 1985 between the Giants and the 49ers. Right before the start of it, Parcells remembers, Walsh said the phones on his side of the field weren’t working. If it had happened, the coach on the other side of the field — Parcells — wasn’t supposed to use his phones until the other team’s were back up and running.
“I know his phones are working,” Parcells says. “But he’s got those first plays he’s gonna run scripted, so he doesn’t care about his phones. He just didn’t want me to be able to use mine.”
The Giants won the game. The next year the 49ers were back at Giants Stadium for another playoff game, and Parcells, who liked Walsh, was with the great 49ers coach on the field before it started.
Parcells said, “Just so you know, Bill, if you try to pull the kind of s--- you did last year, I’m gonna expose you.”
At which point Parcells remembers Walsh smiling and winking at him and saying, “Just a little gamesmanship.”
Was what Walsh did within the law? Maybe it depends on whether you are talking about the spirit of the law or the letter of the law. One coach I spoke to Wednesday, before I ever asked the question about what is being called DeflateGate said, “Doctoring balls isn’t new, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He told about how the home team, back in the days when the home team supplied balls to both offenses, would get two dozen balls the week of the game, eight at a time. And how those balls would be soaked, and washed and rubbed with soap and water, before they’d be put in pillowcases and a ball boy or an equipment manager would bang them up against walls, brick walls, preferably. After all that, the individual balls would be thrown in a clothes dryer.
Was any of that against the rules? It wasn’t. But if the Patriots took air out of footballs against the Colts to give Tom Brady an easier ball to throw, that would be against the rules. Would everybody be this worked up if it wasn’t the Patriots and there had never been a SpyGate? Come on. This is made worse just because of who it is being accused here.
Is it more of a major sports crime than Michael Pineda of the Yankees applying pine tar to a baseball on a cold spring night because it happened in a big championship game? If it is, tell me why it is.
Here is something else to consider: What if Belichick, despite his priors with SpyGate, had nothing to do with it, what if this was just something understood between Tom Brady and the Patriots’ support staff, what kind of ball he liked to throw on a cold, wet day? Then the whole thing starts to sound like BridgeGate, and state employees doing something for Gov. Chris Christie that they assumed he would have wanted them to do.
We will find out soon enough what the NFL has, or thinks it has, on the Patriots, what kind of chain of custody there is for these footballs, and if Goodell — after the year he has had handing out discipline — is willing to throw the book at a team owned by his most vocal advocate, Robert Kraft of the Patriots. For now, all we know is what we think we know, what has been reported about 11 of 12 footballs used by the Patriots against the Colts weighing less than they are supposed to.
There were no real laws broken here, the way famous baseball juicers broke laws about healthy people using anabolic steroids. There were no health hazards here, the way there are clear health hazards for the users of the more hard-core sports drugs. But if this is all true, this was a team that has gone outside the rules and ethics of its sport before to get a competitive edge doing that all over again.
You know this wouldn’t be treated like the crime of the century if it wasn’t the Patriots, and wasn’t the Patriots again. But it is the Patriots. Last time it was big fines and draft choices. If they get convicted this time, maybe one of the most famous coaches in the history of professional sports goes away, whether he wins another Super Bowl or not.
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1uwm4oF
0 comments:
Post a Comment