Ezra Shaw/Getty Images DeflateGate doesn't change what Tom Brady and Bill Belichick have accomplished up to this point. PHOENIX — There were so many false narratives about DeflateGate you lose track by now, starting with the ones from all the loud ex-quarterbacks — the Old Quarterbacks Club doesn’t seem like such a fun fraternity to join anymore — who all threw Tom Brady under the nearest Super Bowl party bus.
Out of the gate you read and heard that the Patriots had to have done it, they were involved with SpyGate! That was an essential element of the prosecutorial brief, especially in the media. You were supposed to believe that SpyGate meant there was a “culture” of liars and cheats and frauds in New England, and that if you ran one red light once you must have run them all.
There is still the one about how Roger Goodell was going to go easy on the Patriots because of Robert Kraft’s loyalty to him, and how much money Kraft had helped make him, even though you better know that Kraft is even madder at Goodell than he let on the other day, the way he is mad at everybody who has come after his coach and his quarterback with pitchforks these past two weeks.
And Brady was supposed to be suspended or Belichick was supposed to be suspended or somebody was supposed to be suspended. And of course there is one about how the Patriots, because of this bag of balls, had somehow challenged the integrity of a league that needed one of its players knocking out his fiancée in an elevator to identify domestic violence as a serious issue in this country; that had the Adrian Peterson story this season; that has a players’ union that rolled over for the commissioner for years and gave him the kind of sweeping powers he has and now wants to talk tough and act virtuous.
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Finally there was the one about how DeflateGate was going to hijack Super Bowl 49 or even ruin it or certainly taint it if the Patriots won.
Only now they kick the ball off on Sunday night and the big game feels as big as it ever has, and so much of it has to do with one thing that has not changed since the Colts started whining: The Patriots don’t just bring in the kind of betting money with them to the Super Bowl that they have this past week (because there has been an amazing amount of Patriots money bet already), they also bring more passion — both ways — than any team we have in sports right now.
Put it this way: They inflate interest in a sport as popular as their own.
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Certainly this game didn’t need controversy. When the betting line was still Patriots by one on Friday, you looked back and found out that there have been only two other one-point lines in all of Super Bowl history: Dolphins vs. Redskins in Super Bowl 7, the Garo Yepremian game, and then the 49ers against the Bengals in 1982, the first time Bill Walsh and Joe Montana won it all.
The Patriots may lose to the Seahawks on Sunday night the way they lost to the Giants here, and then lost to the Giants again in Indianapolis. The Seahawks may officially announce that this is their time by 10 o’clock Eastern time, and Russell Wilson may have slayed another giant, and Marshawn Lynch, may even have something to say if he turns out to be the best player on the field and the one the Patriots can’t stop.
But if it is the Patriots who win, you will be properly allowed to say that this is as impressive and important a run as any pro football team has ever had. They will have won as many Super Bowls as Chuck Noll’s Steelers did when they were winning four in six years in the ’70s. They will make the time Belichick and Brady have had together remind you of the time Lombardi’s Packers had in the 1960s, before and after the birth of the Super Bowl.
They will have done it in a salary-cap world. They will have made Foxborough, more than ever, a capital of American sports. This has nothing to do with whether you like Belichick or think Brady is some kind of pretty-boy phony; or even if you think that SpyGate marked them lousy forever, as if that was the crime of the century — it wasn’t — before DeflateGate became the crime of the century, and even had point-missers comparing that bag of balls to steroids. Use a needle to take some air out, use a needle to juice up, same deal.
It isn’t just the Seahawks who want to be the Patriots. Everybody does. I hope Belichick is still coaching in Foxborough after Brady retires, even though that doesn’t seem as if it happens anytime soon, because I want to see what he can do when he doesn’t have the guy my friend John Mara calls “Superman” quarterbacking the New England Patriots.
You know what happened at the same stadium where the Super Bowl will be played on Sunday night when Mara’s team played the 18-0 Patriots. I asked Mara the other day if, considering the opponent and the way the Patriots had played that season, that might have been the best defense anybody ever played in the big game.
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“I think there’s certainly a strong argument for that,” Mara said. “I mean when you consider who we were playing and how much success they’ve had over the year and how dynamic their offense was over that particular season.”
Now the Patriots are back in Glendale, Ariz., and we’ll see if they can do better against Pete Carroll’s defense than they did against that Giant defense. Through all the controversy and all the parity and all that you have to do to sustain excellence under the cap, here they come again, looking bigger and badder than ever.
It is one more thing that makes you want to watch this game, on the night when the whole country goes to a football game, when the first Sunday in February becomes our national sports holiday:
This one feels like Ali-Frazier. The Patriots are the champs here as much as the defending champs.
Tiger’s mess of a game, let Lynch be & Yankee future...
-You can give Tiger Woods every benefit of the doubt as he approaches his 40s, about age and inactivity and injury and how everything changed one Thanksgiving night after a fight with his wife.
People have gone broke in the past writing him off.
But he can talk about his new swing mechanics — which are really a lot like his old swing mechanics — until all of his teeth fall out, and it doesn’t change something:
Over the past few years, even around some of his successes, we have seen one thing creep into his game that was never there when he was the most famous and successful athlete in the country, the new Jordan:
Fear.
He has been afraid of his driver for a while, he has been afraid of the putts he used to be able to make with his eyes closed.
Now in Phoenix this week, even before he shot that 82 in British Open weather on Friday, he looked like every other golfer, famous or not, who has had the yips with his chips.
He tried to hit low runners, the way guys who are afraid of pitches and chips, always do.
He tried his putter from off the green.
And when he had to clear a bunker finally, he really had no plan at all.
He’s overcome a lot in his career, even after he stopped winning majors.
It will be interesting to see, at this stage of his life and his career, where he goes from a tournament when he put a ton of waste into the Waste Management Open.
-For the last time, if Marshawn Lynch doesn’t want to talk to the media, the NFL shouldn’t threaten him to make him do it.
It just turns Super Bowl Week into more of a clown show than it already is.
By the way, I don’t think Lynch is some kind of hero for this stance, and he looked like an idiot grabbing his crotch against the Packers.
But somebody has to explain why forcing him to sit there, even for five minutes, helps grow this football game.
I believe Rob Manfred will be the one to reinstate Pete Rose, and get his name on the Hall of Fame ballot.
-More than ever, I believe that the Yankees will be out of the Steinbrenner family within the next few years.
You look at how the Yankees took a complete pass on Max Scherzer, and absolutely have a right to think that they didn’t want to add one more bad long-term contract before this team goes up for sale one of these days.
I think Hal Steinbrenner is a good guy, and I think he loves the Yankees deeply.
I just don’t think he loves baseball the way the old man did, or New York.
There hasn’t been a more amazing NBA story in 20 years or maybe longer than that — or maybe ever — than the tear the Atlanta Hawks have been on since Thanksgiving.
-Here’s something I haven’t understood on the story of the locker room attendant ducking into that men’s room for 90 seconds, to allegedly deflate all those footballs:
How come the guy had to be on the clock?
What, he was like some one-man pit crew at a NASCAR race?
-Sarah Palin says she is considering running for President and I guess my question would be:
President of what?
Speaking of which:
Mitt Romney may say that he would have won his party’s nomination and the Presidency if he’d decided to run, but nobody who thinks that way quits on his stool.
People keep saying, wait, he was the frontrunner!
Right.
So was Rudy Giuliani once, and then he spent $50 million to win one delegate.
-You know how desperate Knicks fans are when it’s now this nice kid, Langston Galloway, being turned into the next Walt Frazier the way Jeremy Lin once was.
It no longer matters how many majors you think Serena Williams could have won or should have won before she turned it on the way she has over the past several years.
Now you just wait to see if she can pass Steffi Graf at 22 majors, and Margaret Court at 24.
The first time Belichick spoke about DeflateGate, he should have stuck up for Tom Brady the way Bob Kraft did when he got to Phoenix.
You think Troy Aikman would have chirped this much about Brady if Fox were doing Super Bowl 49?
I’m just here so I won’t get fined.
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“Lupica” is heard Monday through Friday from 1-3 p.m. and Sunday at 9 a.m. on ESPN-98.7.
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