Quote:
Originally Posted by ClevelandBronco
For me, this further damages the tatters of integrity left in the game.
There's a rule against ball tampering and a penalty for breaking the rule. IF Brady was involved (and I've seen nothing that convinces me that the balls were altered at all, much less that Brady was involved), he should pay his share of the fine that is the penalty for this offense and that should be the end of it.
I find it shameful that fans of other teams would rather see a successful team unjustly penalized than see the rules enforced.
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I think it's an interesting problem, because I think it's about far more than the deflation stuff.
The Patriots have been gaming the rules against the spirit of the game for a long time. At its core, the objective of any sport is to identify and laud the best athletes. Most of the teams understand and agree with that, and play within the rules.
The Patriots and the Broncos are always doing something to tilt the odds in their favor with stuff that's highly questionable. Whether it's the garbage that Belichick pulled with the jersey numbers or the filming or the Broncos always making deals behind the salary cap, they're changing the focus of the sport. It's not about lauding the best athletes for those two franchises, and it hasn't been for years. They're changing the game to lauding the best people who find loopholes in the rulebook or the best people who make creative contracts to undermine the salary cap.
In the long term of the league, that's not a good thing. If it's about that, we could go be fans of Boeing or Apple or something. In sports, people want it to be about the athletes, not the rules. So I think this penalty is more of a message to the Patriots to stop worming around everything.
The funny thing is, some of these things shouldn't even be against the rules. I don't care if Tom Brady wants a deflated ball, and I don't even really care about videoing the practices.
On a related note about the videos, I watched a 30 for 30 show about the Buffalo Bills this weekend and their four lost Super Bowls. Before the Super Bowl against the Cowboys, Jimmy Johnson was watching ESPN, which showed some clips of the pre-game warmups. He noticed that Jim Kelly was doing a lot of shuttle pass practices to Thurman Thomas, and the Bills hadn't done shuttle passes all year. He told his defensive coordinator about it and they gave the defense an emergency prep before the game.
Oh, and by the way, the Bills went to their first Super Bowl because they faced a terrible quarterback in the AFC championship. The Broncos eventually benched Elway because he was playing terribly and the Broncos were getting shut out. The Broncos' only touchdown came from Gary Kubiak in the fourth quarter, and the Bills won 10-7. I love hearing about how Elway was so consistently bad in big games.