Originally Posted by
Mal
I really, really dislike this idea. Do we let baseball pitchers bring slightly heavier or lighter balls to the game and pitch with them? Do we let hockey teams choose the puck they play with on their home ice? Should we let teams adjust the laces to suit their quarterback's specifications, too? How about allowing them to file down the little dimples all over it? IMHO, a football is supposed to be a standardized piece of equipment. The preferences of individual quarterbacks shouldn't even come into the picture. The balls should have a uniform feel and size and pressure. I don't even like the idea of separate balls for kickers and punters. I think there should be one set of league provided footballs, attended to by a league employed officials crew member, used for both teams' offensive possessions. All the balls should be gathered up by the league official at halftime, the pressure in them checked, and then returned to a sideline location attended to by a league person.
Back to the topic, TampaDuke's knocking it out of the park in this thread. It's not a criminal matter - there's no due process here, and the standard is whatever the heck the NFL decides it to be. Bostondevil, sorry, but the Pats and everyone around them look pathetic in their response to the report. Kraft's losing everyone's respect with his theatrics. The primary responses from the organization and fans has been the loser's defense of "everyone's cheating" combined with "the Colts are the real bad guy here!" And, sorry to say, as I'm sure this is all bothersome, but I find it hard to swallow your assertion upthread that Tom Brady (Tom Brady! Literally, the biggest star in the entire league; a man who brings in countless millions to the entire ownership group) had "no way to defend himself" in this episode. He chose not to defend himself. Most likely because he either knew he didn't have much of a defense, he figured that no smoking gun could really ever be found (especially without his help) in this sort of investigation, or he assumed that the worst possible result would be exactly where we are now: reputational hit, possible fine and miss a couple games.
The Pats would have been much better off if they'd just owned up to this, placed the blame on a sometimes overzealous striving to find any and all ways to win and noting that in this instance they went a little too far, and then focused on minimizing the actual transgression (which is, in the grand scheme of things, not that big of a deal, and they probably would have clobbered the Colts even if their footballs had been filled with lead). Instead they've (a) allowed a fairly trivial transgression to grow and grow in the minds of the broader public, to the point it's become just a step down from Chick Gandil or something, and (b) let the classic "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" storyline build and then fester. So their entire offseason has been spent feeding the impression of everyone outside of New England that they're arrogant and think they're above the law of the league.