It now appears that the New England Patriots were cheating when they used deflated footballs in their game against the Indianapolis Colts. Some of the evidence that has been presented appears to be circumstantial, but the trail of texts seems to indicate that some form skullduggery took place and that Tom Brady was involved.
So what do you do about the situation? It's not clear that there is any recourse for the National Football League. You really can't scrap the results of the game and and you certainly cannot get the protagonists back on the field.
All you really can do, I suppose, is to make sure that standards are met for games in the future. I'm not certain that is the Patriots really gained that much benefit from the cheating; in some respects, I think the primary advantage was psychological. If Tom Brady and his compatriots on the Patriots felt they gained an advantage from having slightly under inflated footballs, that might explain the results in a close game. Of course, the AFC championship game wasn't particularly close. It would be difficult to argue that the Colts were a superior team who ran afoul of a vast conspiracy, especially when they could not score and their defense was atrocious.
Most football fans consider the Patriots to be an evil empire anyway, so I suspect that in the end this controversy won't change perceptions very much. I do worry that young people who are learning the game of football will take the wrong lessons from this episode, but one has to hope that the coaches and supporters of young players are somewhat more ethical than Tom Brady appears to be.
5 comments:
By the way, this post was a test of the voice function on Blogger. It seems to work decently, as long as you proofread a bit.
you appear to blog in the same voice you speak in.
in high school and college, you forfeit the games/lose titles if cheating if found to have occurred.
it should be the same in the NFL.
IIRC, the NFL shares the majority of its revenues from TV and merchandising among the league. Which really disincentives the league from punishing any team in any way that would actually matter.
IIRC, the NFL shares the majority of its revenues from TV and merchandising among the league. Which really disincentives the league from punishing any team in any way that would actually matter.
I agree. It's a balancing act, though. If fans start to believe that the fix is in, the league won't recover.
It strikes me that if you want to remove the issue, you make sure the league handles the game balls and allows the teams to check a few. Of course, basic good sense doesn't seem to prevail here.
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