Your Cheatin’ Heart
“Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.”
Hank Williams
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By now, almost everyone has heard of the penalties levied against the New England Patriots and quarterback Tom Brady for their role in that fiasco known, amongst other things, as “Deflate gate.” And everybody seems to have an opinion on the matter. Here’s my take.
Apparently, the “crime” that was committed was that (to make a long explanation short) Tom Brady “told” the equipment guys on his team that he liked his footballs (each team is allowed to modify the air pressure to their liking, so long as the pressure meets the minimal standards the league requires) to have lower air pressure than normal.
The way the sequence of events seems to have unfolded, (in a playoff game against the Indy Colts), the equipment guys took the New England batch of footballs and let too much air out of their supply. (The Patriots apparently had been known to like their footballs with that minimal amount of allowable air, or, if some theories are correct, they liked to have them even lower than the NFL standards) They WANTED their balls to have as low of pressure as possible for their quarterback Tom Brady. Even below the NFL standard would be okay “someone” might have hinted to their equipment guys, wink, wink.
When the Patriots supply of the footballs of the Colt game were tested, they came out below the NFL standards. The Colts complained. (the irony of it all is that the Patriots didn’t need to “cheat” as they crushed Indy 45 to 7 in this playoff game) The Patriots COULD have handled it right then and there if they had admitted that there was “human error,” and they were trying to get the balls as low as possible, but simply took too much air out. But New England chose to stonewall it as a defense. They did NOT cooperate fully with the investigation into the matter. Their owner was defiant as he chastised the Commissioner of the NFL for having the nerve to say the Patriots could ever be guilty of doing anything wrong. The Patriots rubbed a lot of people the wrong way during this whole matter.
It was a battle of two different ways of going about business. The normal, legal way of doing things. And the Patriot Way. In other words, the Patriots were trying to stretch the rules of low air pressure to the limit, and were willing to take the risk to even go beyond that limit, to give themselves as much of an advantage as possible. They could have stayed within the fair limits, but they felt they needed that added extra advantage. The LINE was a ball that had to have 12.5 lbs. of pressure, and they CROSSED that line to get the balls down to around 11 lbs. for Brady. Risk vs. reward.
It was a microscopic difference in the great scheme of things. To the fans in the stands and on TV, all of the footballs from both teams looked pretty much the same. But, the Patriots, in their stubborn insistence in ALWAYS having to be trying to give themselves an edge over their opponents, CROSSED THE LINE of fair play. They knew that there was a minimal level of air pressure in footballs and they chose to go even under that level to get that edge. New England was caught in the act, and the punishment (a million dollar fine, the loss of a #1 draft choice, a four game suspension for Tom Brady) has been much more severe than the simple act of deflating footballs a bit too much.
The effect has been polarizing. To New England fans, they want to defend their team because they are THEIR hometown team that is just trying to win for THEIR fan base. They are just trying to get “that edge” over their opponents so they can win games for THEM. In other words, their allegiance is SUBJECTIVE, not objective. Their arguments are also subjective to their team allegiance. A bad call (the exact same hypothetical call) that costs the opposing team the game is an acceptable judgement call by a ref if it helps THEIR team win, and it is a horrible thing if it causes THEIR team to lose. This was a call that went against THEIR team.
To fans who don’t like New England, the tactic of deflating footballs to give them an advantage is just another “cheating” tactic that the Patriots employ to try to win games. The Patriots, you might remember, were the team that was busted for spying on opposing teams’ practices (Spy gate) to again give themselves an edge over their opponents. New England was caught trying to gain an edge, or cheating, in these two publicized instances. Opposing fans have the feeling that there’s a whole lot of other things that they have gotten away with that they have NOT been caught doing.
The perception that the New England Patriots were cheating against the rules of fair play is the major reason the Commissioner of the NFL dropped the hammer on New England. The majority of the fans of the NFL might have thought that the punishment was a bit too much to fit “the crime,” but the overall feeling of the Commissioner and most of the fans is that they are just sick and tired of the way New England is ALWAYS trying to bend the rules of fair play to get an advantage for themselves. If this was what it would take to get the Patriots to “play fair,” then maybe a punishment for “all of the other stuff that MIGHT have happened” doesn’t seem so severe at all. Every move the Commissioner makes is watched closely by everyone (after Ray Rice) and he has to err on the side of “is he getting this decision right?”
The New England Patriots are being punished as if they committed a felony when all they committed was a misdemeanor. But, they WERE guilty of committing a misdemeanor when they were the equivalent of the O.J. Simpson of the NFL for having “likely” committed other crimes that they had “gotten away with.” But now, they got caught bending the rules and there was a chance to try to “punish them fairly.”
Being “punished fairly” might have been a more lenient result with a more cooperative Tom Brady and a less defiant and more gracious Patriot owner Robert Kraft, but they chose to lawyer up and defy the Commissioner of the sport that helped to make them rich instead of admitting that they were wrong in doing what they had done. Sometimes, people who lawyer up and stonewall an investigation end up getting in more trouble than if they would have just cooperated. In other words, sometimes lawyers might think they are giving good advice in theory, but they end up offering bad advice in reality. So, the Patriots got hammered for their arrogance. Payback.
At the end of this, the status quo will probably still remain about the same. People will probably forget about most of this in a few years, as they often do in an age where there is always something new coming at you. In the short term, New England will still be a good team, a contender to win it all nearly every year for the near future. Tom Brady will still be looked at as one of, if not THE best quarterback ever, as people realize that the “crime” he committed is not worthy of adding too much tarnish to his legacy. The only thing that will be tarnished is The Patriot Way, which is probably as it should be.
And if the average New England fan was to be asked, “Was this all worth it? Was it all worth having your name, your team, your city tarnished in this humiliating way?” They’d probably answer, “Hell, yeah, we won the freaking Super Bowl, didn’t we?”
