jetstream1066
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Pats have earned every sb they have won....I never questioned that
And another thing...
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Pats have earned every sb they have won....I never questioned that
jetstream1066
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and all along I thought it was the jets who were best buds with Goodell
Hawg73
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Yep.
Now you know what it's been like for us watching you guys since the internet was invented.
It's great, isn't it? I try not to make too big a deal of it when I read Jets forums, but when an entire opposing fanbase is going nuts it's like shooting the curl of a perfect wave.
I personally have never seen anything like the reaction Kraft is getting today. It's like every decent thing the guy ever did was ruined in 5 minutes and he's now he's Monty Burns and just put Springfield in mortal danger.
I've taken a few shots at him myself, but there is little point in being reasonable today.
jetstream1066
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I honestly don't get why Kraft is getting killed by so many. I can see why ppl might be upset by the outcome of his decision, but nobody was in the room when he made his decision. Maybe he did it because he was in a lose lose situation, and took the road that would do less damage.....which was probably the road that will get the suspension reduced to 2 games......which is better for his team.
timithye
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We will never know, but I am most curious to hear/see the reception he gets from the players in the locker room.
He proved where his loyalties lie and it is not with the team.
He proved where his loyalties lie and it is not with the team.
Kraft knows that a reduction to 2 games is still unacceptable to Brady and the NFLPA. He wouldn't sell out for something so futile. Anything less than zero games and the case is in court. Hell, it may end up in court anyways (as a defamation suit).
Hawg73
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I find the 2 games theory plausible and, in fact, those dots were so easy to connect that everybody is suggesting the two are tied together and we've already got Adam Schefter reporting that is not the case. Who knows?
I think people are killing him because the constant stream of cheaters! rhetoric is really wearing us all down. It's just so tedious and stupid.
We want it all. We want to win every year and everybody to recognize what an achievement it is to even be in the conversation as often as we have been, but most are way too sick and tired of us to bother.
We want them to see the hard work, strategy and team-building philosophies of Belichick for what they really are and it's like that is completely invisible to vast segments of the people who care about pro football. People would rather come up with simpler, juicier explanations and, at the core, that drives us mad. Why can't they get it?
We want people to love us, or at least respect us and that is simply never going to happen. Ever. People talk about embracing the hate, but nobody really wants it to be that way. It's just fvcking sports, but for hardcore fans we get confused about what is real life and what is bread and circus. We aren't rational about the big picture.
We saw Kraft as a conduit to vindication-- our torch-bearer, but the odds were slim.
And then Slim left town.
Our Daddy lied to us.
jetstream1066
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I just don't think he had any choice other than this. The suspension being reduced, as you stated, is the most reasonable scenario......if Kraft was in a lose lose.....then doing what he has done, gets TB on the field at least 2 games sooner....which is a display of doing what is best for the team
There's a very easy double standard to see here. Back from the latter part of the last century through just a couple years ago, this was the Yankees. Sure, there are Yankee haters aplenty out there, but the seeming story was what a class act Derek Jeter was (gag me, one of the most classless douchebags to ever set foot on a playing surface) and how great it was that the Yankees are always "in the hunt". I guess there are still to this day a whole lot of butthurt fans out there (probably most of whom are fantasy sports people- I fvcking HATE fantasy sports) who think that Peyton Manning should have been Tom Brady, instead of Dan Marino with a ring
The problem that the majority of sports fans have is that they've never really played any sport beyond the level of everybody plays, everybody gets a trophy. They don't understand the hard work, dedication and sacrifice that go into playing at an elite level. O.Z.O. Jr. plays varsity for one of the best baseball programs in our county, and has played above age level full time travel for the last 2 years. His best friend since the 4th grade is a DE for one of the elite HS football programs in the country and already has 16 D1 full ride offers- which include Stanford, Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Auburn, Georgia Tech and LSU. The kid is 6'6", 295# and probably has a fairly decent shot at getting a chance to play in the NFL someday. Most people never get close to anything like this. Look at the fans they show in NFL promo ads (I hate these btw), generally short, fat or real skinny guys that look completely un-athletic.
As far as I'm concerned, if you think the only reason one team smashes another team by 5 touchdowns is because of a football being .5 psi lower than regulation, you are a special kind of clueless stupid...willfully blind and ignorant. Unfortunately, the NFL fanbase is loaded with morons like this.
EasyBigFella
Got 6? YUP
Put it this way, by your avatar you are a NY Rangers fan. Let's say they go on and win the Cup and you spend the offseason in a scandal because Chris Kreider scored the winning goal with a stick that was illegal because the curve was too sharp. You know it didn't affect a damn thing, but every day, the media keeps hammering the Rangers on it. Bettman then says Kreider is suspended 25% of the season (20 games in this case) and your owner vows to fight it to the death because it's idiotic.
He then spends an hour with Bettman and suddenly does a complete 180. As a fan, you are left feeling completely screwed and his acceptance of the penalty somehow validates the idiotic concept that your team cheated to win a championship.
benhamean
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...and by extension, the '93-4 championship was because of cheating too...
jetfan4hire
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Great article on the Patriots
SPORTS NUT
THE STADIUM SCENE.
MAY 18 2015 9:55 PM
Patriots Derangement Syndrome
Deflategate has sent New England fans over the deep end.
By Stephen Metcalf
Ideally, one part of the brain—commonly known as “the understanding”—limits the psychic distortions of sports viewing to a civilized minimum. If my Facebook feed is any indication, the balance between healthy fanaticism and clinical psychosis—on the part of some otherwise nice people—has been tipped in an alarming direction. This is thanks to “deflategate”: the case of the New England Patriots and the allegedly intentional deflation of footballs.
Over the years, Patriots fans have learned to treat every feature of reality as fluid in order to hold two variables—Bill Belichick is the greatest coach who ever lived, and Tom Brady the greatest quarterback—absolutely constant. With the release of the Wells Report—the NFL’s 243-page report laying out the case that footballs were tampered with—the condition has gone code red.
To Pats Nation, “you hate us cause you ain’t us,” or, in English, any criticism of the franchise is sour grapes; the Wells report has been debunked; Spygate was trumped-up nonsense; the fumble statistics indicating the franchise has been advantageously deflating for years are a mess; the Pats would have beaten the Colts anyway; and the team is the victim of a witch hunt. To get a fuller picture of how fandom can bend an otherwise normal psyche in the direction of wishful thinking, selective memory, and situational ethics, let’s look at these claims one by one and in reverse order.
The Patriots are the victims of a witch hunt: To believe this, you have to believe the sport’s commissioner, Roger Goodell is intent on singling out the franchise, painting it in the worst possible light and, while rallying the media and the public to his side, excessively punishing it simply for being smarter, better coached, and more disciplined. To believe that, you have to ignore ample evidence that Goodell’s interests lay in precisely the opposite direction, starting with his one-time friendship with Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Here is how Sports Illustrated recently described the relationship between Kraft and Goodell:
Kraft in many ways made NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Kraft helped push through Goodell’s election in 2006. Five years later, Kraft left his ailing wife, Myra, to convince the players that Goodell, who was widely despised, and the league could be trusted in negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. Kraft helped promote and justify Goodell’s salary increase from $11.5 million before the 2011 lockout to an average of $37 million over the last two fiscal years. And in the wake of last year’s Ray Rice debacle, Goodell’s darkest hour, Kraft defended Goodell to the public and worked behind the scenes to make sure other owners remained loyal to the embattled commissioner.
As the article goes on to note, the Pats “generated the most complaints to the Competition Committee during the Bill Belichick era, and many team executives felt the issues raised were swept under the rug.” As Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman colorfully pointed out before his team faced the Patriots in the Super Bowl, Goodell was a guest at Kraft’s Brookline home the very day of the deflategate game. As GQ reported, one NFL executive even nicknamed Kraft “the assistant commissioner.”
We would have beaten the Colts anyway: This is demonstrably true, and completely irrelevant. Cheating tosses counterfactuals out the window. It doesn’t matter how good Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, etc. would have been without synthetic enhancement. The use of prohibited advantages forfeits the claim to intrinsic excellence. If my child cheated on an exam then claimed she would have “pulled an A anyway,” I’d double the length of her grounding.
You don’t have to look hard to find a 2014 playoff opponent the Patriots did beat by a slim margin. One week before dominating the Colts, the Patriots edged the Ravens by four points—a thriller in which one turnover might have made the difference. A deflated football is easier for a quarterback to grip, of course, but also apparently harder to fumble. Which brings us to …
Those fumble statistics are a hopeless mess: In the immediate aftermath of deflategate, a blogger named Warren Sharp posted a homegrown analysis, in which he attempted to demonstrate that the Patriots fumble rate since 2007 has been a statistical outlier on the low side. (Slate, among other outlets, republished this study when it first appeared.) Why was this important? As Sharp pointed out, in 2006 Tom Brady led a campaign by NFL quarterbacks to gain pre-game control of their footballs. In March 2006, the NFL Competition Committee agreed. It was after this rule change, Sharp pointed out, that the Patriots’ fumble rate dropped dramatically.
Sharp’s analysis suggested the Patriots, and not just Tom Brady, derived an enormous, and not just a marginal, advantage from a deflated football. The study immediately came under withering attack. Sharp is an engineer, not a statistician, and he didn’t account for every variable. But Sharp’s rejoinder is hard to answer. Regardless of how much of an outlier the Pats’ fumble rate is, it declined, declined significantly, and did so after the rule change.
Hypernumerate sophisticates have demanded this study be chucked. (Oddly, many of these hail from New England. Paging Thomas Bayes!) But when a writer for Nate Silver’s esteemed data journalism site FiveThirtyEight looked at it again, he wasn’t so sure. “Though it had flaws,” Benjamin Morris wrote, Sharp’s study “correctly identified that the Patriots fumble rate has been absurdly small. I did my own calculations using binomial and Poisson models and found the same.” Brian Burke, an occasional Slate contributor who is a trusted and respected source on NFL stats, agreed that there was something to the argument that Pats’ fumble stats got really good in 2007.
Sharp’s analysis may have overstated the precise degree to which the Pats’ fumble rate is an outlier, as Slate’s Jordan Ellenberg found when he re-ran the numbers. But if the team’s fumble rates plunged after Brady got his rule change—and it did—that gun still smokes. The Patriots’ fumble rate in light of deflategate “makes it more likely that the relationship between inflation levels and fumbling is real—and more likely that the Patriots have materially benefited from their cheating,” as Morris concluded.
Spygate is trumped-up nonsense: Spygate provides the basis for the severity of Goodell’s deflategate punishment; it is data-point No. 1 for believing the Patriots are serial cheaters. Who wants to relive Spygate? Nobody. Which is what Pats fans are counting on when they claim that, in videotaping opposing coaches’ signals, the Pats did nothing wrong.
But there was more to Spygate than NFL fans want to recall. Here’s the basic outline: The NFL rulebook has an unambiguous ban on sideline videotaping. The league sent out a memorandum prior to the 2006 season, emphasizing its rule banning video recording. On Sept. 9, 2007, in the Pats season opener, security officers seized a sideline video camera used to steal coaches’ signals from the team’s opponents, the New York Jets.
The Patriots, it turned out, had been signal-harvesting under Bill Belichick for a while. Their video trove included at least one tape from a playoff game in their 2002 Super Bowl run. Matt Walsh, the Patriots videographer, later claimed that he made nearly a hundred “cut-ups” per game—that is, signal-steals converted into video snippets. These were allegedly cataloged, then used in-game to predict formations and plays; these predictions were sent via radio signal into Tom Brady’s helmet. In no uncertain terms, Walsh claimed to HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel that the team organization knew what it was doing was wrong; that it took pains to hide it; that it was advantageous; and that Bill Belichick was fully complicit.
Why should we believe Walsh? After news of Spygate broke, Walsh hid from the media out of fear of litigation. Walsh came forward only after Sen. Arlen Specter forced the issue, and the Pats and the NFL signed an indemnity agreement with Walsh. The agreement was fragile: If Walsh uttered a falsehood, its protections were negated. Parties signed in late April 2008. Walsh was interviewed by HBO and revealed the above information at the beginning of May.
For taping opponents’ coaches and thereby stealing their signals, Roger Goodell found the Patriots guilty of “a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid longstanding rules designed to encourage fair play,” then levied what were, at the time, the severest penalties in the history of the sport. Was this unduly harsh? Tuck away your persecution complex, Pats Nation. Goodell punished the Patriots without seeing the tapes; his surrogates reviewed the tapes in the Patriots’ own facilities in Foxboro, Massachusetts, not at NFL headquarters in New York; they then destroyed all the evidence on site, before anyone else could review it.
Pats fans want to believe Belichick took advantage of a gray area in the rulebook: He derived no important benefit from it anyway, and the punishment did not fit the crime. The truth is, the Patriots violated a black-and-white rule; they gained an anti-competitive advantage doing so; and they were lifted off a much sharper hook by a commissioner looking to make the scandal disappear.
The Wells Report has been successfully rebutted: The Patriots “rebuttal” to the Wells Report is a public relations document aimed more at Chuckie Sullivan than any finder of fact. Setting aside its more obviously asinine hypotheses, its overall strategy is plain: To take each piece of evidence and isolate it from any context, then show how standing alone it proves nothing. The report as a whole adds up to a Bayesian nightmare for the Patriots—that is, regardless of how individual facts can be construed, together they point to a single inference: Patriots employees knowingly tampered with game-day footballs.
Ignoring distractions (a Pats’ employee nicknaming himself the “deflator” only in reference to weight loss), let’s take the most important details one at a time.
A Nobel Prize winner disputes the science of the Wells Report: I note without comment that the esteemed laureate is a neurobiologist whose work is unrelated to ideal gas theory. He is, however, the founder of a startup company, one of whose principal investors is “the Kraft Group,” according to the Boston Globe.
The Patriots were fully cooperative and only denied an absurd fifth interview request with Jim McNally, the so-called “deflator”: After an initial set of interviews with NFL security—during which McNally’s story shifted suspiciously—the NFL hired Ted Wells to supervise a formal investigation. Wells wanted to interview McNally for a second time after discovering the “deflator” text. He offered to meet McNally anywhere, and anytime. Attorneys for the Patriots refused.
Tom Brady gave nothing of special value to the deflategate flunkies when he handed them autographed memorabilia: McNally didn’t receive any ordinary headshot scrawled with magic marker. McNally—with Brady present—was handed a signed, game-worn Tom Brady jersey. A similar jersey sold for more than $45,000 in 2012. John Jastremski, meanwhile, proudly claimed he was in possession of the very ball Brady threw to surpass the historic 50,000–yard mark, though he later said he was lying about that.
Three of the four tested Colts balls were also in violation of the psi requirement: On three of eight measurements, the Colts balls were fractionally lower than the required 12.5 pounds per square inch (psi), and at exactly the level anticipated by the Patriots’ own deflation theory—i.e., that starting out in a locker room and getting colder outdoors can marginally shrink a football. Eleven Patriots footballs on all 22 measurements, meanwhile, were well below regulation psi. None of the gathered referees and none of the summoned senior NFL officials—not one—thought any of the Colts footballs needed a single puff of air to be certified for second-half play. In sum: Every Colts football was legal; every Patriots football that was tested was illegal.
Referee Walt Anderson is unsure which of two gauges he used to measure psi of the footballs prior to the AFC Championship Game kickoff. Of the attempts to throw sand in the public’s eyes, this is the only one that is at all jury-worthy. (Though not, I think, arbitrator-worthy.) Whichever gauge Anderson used, he is adamant that the Patriots pre-game ball was at 12.5 psi, and the Colts ball closer to 13—exactly in line with each team’s stated preference. The two gauges in question, however, were slightly “off” relative to one another—one consistently read 0.3 to 0.4 higher psi than the other. It is very likely Anderson used the more accurate gauge, as he firmly recalls the footballs as set at the team’s preferred psi. (To believe he used the “off” gauge, you’d have to believe it was “off” to exactly the same degree as both the Pats and the Colts’ own gauges, used to set footballs precisely to their respective quarterbacks’ liking.)
But it doesn’t matter which gauge Anderson used. It doesn’t matter because the Wells Report ran the numbers both ways. Both times its hired quants came up with a statistically significant difference between the drop in pressure of the Patriots balls relative to the drop in pressure of the Colts balls. Under both scenarios, that “delta” is not explicable by gas theory, atmospheric conditions, or discrepancy in game use.
Any claim that the status of the Colts’ balls negates the status of the Pats’ balls ignores the following: Game officials had been warned ahead of time about the Patriots using deflated footballs; the Patriots footballs were in fact deflated; there are dozens of text messages between two Patriots employees referring to deflating footballs; one of these employees initially lied about the eventually deflated footballs’ chain of custody (a protocol violation at the time struck the head referee as alarming); the employee subsequently lied about his whereabouts; alternative to intentional deflation, there is no explanation for the fact that Patriots footballs were more deflated than Colts footballs, or none that has survived repeated testing.
Finally, the entire argument boils down to: You hate us cause you ain’t us.
No Pats Nation, I’m sorry. I do not hate you because I ain’t you. I just prefer living in a world where the normal canons of observation and inference still abide.
Over all this presides the figurehead droning on about “integrity.”
SPORTS NUT
THE STADIUM SCENE.
MAY 18 2015 9:55 PM
Patriots Derangement Syndrome
Deflategate has sent New England fans over the deep end.
By Stephen Metcalf
Ideally, one part of the brain—commonly known as “the understanding”—limits the psychic distortions of sports viewing to a civilized minimum. If my Facebook feed is any indication, the balance between healthy fanaticism and clinical psychosis—on the part of some otherwise nice people—has been tipped in an alarming direction. This is thanks to “deflategate”: the case of the New England Patriots and the allegedly intentional deflation of footballs.
Over the years, Patriots fans have learned to treat every feature of reality as fluid in order to hold two variables—Bill Belichick is the greatest coach who ever lived, and Tom Brady the greatest quarterback—absolutely constant. With the release of the Wells Report—the NFL’s 243-page report laying out the case that footballs were tampered with—the condition has gone code red.
To Pats Nation, “you hate us cause you ain’t us,” or, in English, any criticism of the franchise is sour grapes; the Wells report has been debunked; Spygate was trumped-up nonsense; the fumble statistics indicating the franchise has been advantageously deflating for years are a mess; the Pats would have beaten the Colts anyway; and the team is the victim of a witch hunt. To get a fuller picture of how fandom can bend an otherwise normal psyche in the direction of wishful thinking, selective memory, and situational ethics, let’s look at these claims one by one and in reverse order.
The Patriots are the victims of a witch hunt: To believe this, you have to believe the sport’s commissioner, Roger Goodell is intent on singling out the franchise, painting it in the worst possible light and, while rallying the media and the public to his side, excessively punishing it simply for being smarter, better coached, and more disciplined. To believe that, you have to ignore ample evidence that Goodell’s interests lay in precisely the opposite direction, starting with his one-time friendship with Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Here is how Sports Illustrated recently described the relationship between Kraft and Goodell:
Kraft in many ways made NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Kraft helped push through Goodell’s election in 2006. Five years later, Kraft left his ailing wife, Myra, to convince the players that Goodell, who was widely despised, and the league could be trusted in negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. Kraft helped promote and justify Goodell’s salary increase from $11.5 million before the 2011 lockout to an average of $37 million over the last two fiscal years. And in the wake of last year’s Ray Rice debacle, Goodell’s darkest hour, Kraft defended Goodell to the public and worked behind the scenes to make sure other owners remained loyal to the embattled commissioner.
As the article goes on to note, the Pats “generated the most complaints to the Competition Committee during the Bill Belichick era, and many team executives felt the issues raised were swept under the rug.” As Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman colorfully pointed out before his team faced the Patriots in the Super Bowl, Goodell was a guest at Kraft’s Brookline home the very day of the deflategate game. As GQ reported, one NFL executive even nicknamed Kraft “the assistant commissioner.”
We would have beaten the Colts anyway: This is demonstrably true, and completely irrelevant. Cheating tosses counterfactuals out the window. It doesn’t matter how good Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, etc. would have been without synthetic enhancement. The use of prohibited advantages forfeits the claim to intrinsic excellence. If my child cheated on an exam then claimed she would have “pulled an A anyway,” I’d double the length of her grounding.
You don’t have to look hard to find a 2014 playoff opponent the Patriots did beat by a slim margin. One week before dominating the Colts, the Patriots edged the Ravens by four points—a thriller in which one turnover might have made the difference. A deflated football is easier for a quarterback to grip, of course, but also apparently harder to fumble. Which brings us to …
Those fumble statistics are a hopeless mess: In the immediate aftermath of deflategate, a blogger named Warren Sharp posted a homegrown analysis, in which he attempted to demonstrate that the Patriots fumble rate since 2007 has been a statistical outlier on the low side. (Slate, among other outlets, republished this study when it first appeared.) Why was this important? As Sharp pointed out, in 2006 Tom Brady led a campaign by NFL quarterbacks to gain pre-game control of their footballs. In March 2006, the NFL Competition Committee agreed. It was after this rule change, Sharp pointed out, that the Patriots’ fumble rate dropped dramatically.
Sharp’s analysis suggested the Patriots, and not just Tom Brady, derived an enormous, and not just a marginal, advantage from a deflated football. The study immediately came under withering attack. Sharp is an engineer, not a statistician, and he didn’t account for every variable. But Sharp’s rejoinder is hard to answer. Regardless of how much of an outlier the Pats’ fumble rate is, it declined, declined significantly, and did so after the rule change.
Hypernumerate sophisticates have demanded this study be chucked. (Oddly, many of these hail from New England. Paging Thomas Bayes!) But when a writer for Nate Silver’s esteemed data journalism site FiveThirtyEight looked at it again, he wasn’t so sure. “Though it had flaws,” Benjamin Morris wrote, Sharp’s study “correctly identified that the Patriots fumble rate has been absurdly small. I did my own calculations using binomial and Poisson models and found the same.” Brian Burke, an occasional Slate contributor who is a trusted and respected source on NFL stats, agreed that there was something to the argument that Pats’ fumble stats got really good in 2007.
Sharp’s analysis may have overstated the precise degree to which the Pats’ fumble rate is an outlier, as Slate’s Jordan Ellenberg found when he re-ran the numbers. But if the team’s fumble rates plunged after Brady got his rule change—and it did—that gun still smokes. The Patriots’ fumble rate in light of deflategate “makes it more likely that the relationship between inflation levels and fumbling is real—and more likely that the Patriots have materially benefited from their cheating,” as Morris concluded.
Spygate is trumped-up nonsense: Spygate provides the basis for the severity of Goodell’s deflategate punishment; it is data-point No. 1 for believing the Patriots are serial cheaters. Who wants to relive Spygate? Nobody. Which is what Pats fans are counting on when they claim that, in videotaping opposing coaches’ signals, the Pats did nothing wrong.
But there was more to Spygate than NFL fans want to recall. Here’s the basic outline: The NFL rulebook has an unambiguous ban on sideline videotaping. The league sent out a memorandum prior to the 2006 season, emphasizing its rule banning video recording. On Sept. 9, 2007, in the Pats season opener, security officers seized a sideline video camera used to steal coaches’ signals from the team’s opponents, the New York Jets.
The Patriots, it turned out, had been signal-harvesting under Bill Belichick for a while. Their video trove included at least one tape from a playoff game in their 2002 Super Bowl run. Matt Walsh, the Patriots videographer, later claimed that he made nearly a hundred “cut-ups” per game—that is, signal-steals converted into video snippets. These were allegedly cataloged, then used in-game to predict formations and plays; these predictions were sent via radio signal into Tom Brady’s helmet. In no uncertain terms, Walsh claimed to HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel that the team organization knew what it was doing was wrong; that it took pains to hide it; that it was advantageous; and that Bill Belichick was fully complicit.
Why should we believe Walsh? After news of Spygate broke, Walsh hid from the media out of fear of litigation. Walsh came forward only after Sen. Arlen Specter forced the issue, and the Pats and the NFL signed an indemnity agreement with Walsh. The agreement was fragile: If Walsh uttered a falsehood, its protections were negated. Parties signed in late April 2008. Walsh was interviewed by HBO and revealed the above information at the beginning of May.
For taping opponents’ coaches and thereby stealing their signals, Roger Goodell found the Patriots guilty of “a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid longstanding rules designed to encourage fair play,” then levied what were, at the time, the severest penalties in the history of the sport. Was this unduly harsh? Tuck away your persecution complex, Pats Nation. Goodell punished the Patriots without seeing the tapes; his surrogates reviewed the tapes in the Patriots’ own facilities in Foxboro, Massachusetts, not at NFL headquarters in New York; they then destroyed all the evidence on site, before anyone else could review it.
Pats fans want to believe Belichick took advantage of a gray area in the rulebook: He derived no important benefit from it anyway, and the punishment did not fit the crime. The truth is, the Patriots violated a black-and-white rule; they gained an anti-competitive advantage doing so; and they were lifted off a much sharper hook by a commissioner looking to make the scandal disappear.
The Wells Report has been successfully rebutted: The Patriots “rebuttal” to the Wells Report is a public relations document aimed more at Chuckie Sullivan than any finder of fact. Setting aside its more obviously asinine hypotheses, its overall strategy is plain: To take each piece of evidence and isolate it from any context, then show how standing alone it proves nothing. The report as a whole adds up to a Bayesian nightmare for the Patriots—that is, regardless of how individual facts can be construed, together they point to a single inference: Patriots employees knowingly tampered with game-day footballs.
Ignoring distractions (a Pats’ employee nicknaming himself the “deflator” only in reference to weight loss), let’s take the most important details one at a time.
A Nobel Prize winner disputes the science of the Wells Report: I note without comment that the esteemed laureate is a neurobiologist whose work is unrelated to ideal gas theory. He is, however, the founder of a startup company, one of whose principal investors is “the Kraft Group,” according to the Boston Globe.
The Patriots were fully cooperative and only denied an absurd fifth interview request with Jim McNally, the so-called “deflator”: After an initial set of interviews with NFL security—during which McNally’s story shifted suspiciously—the NFL hired Ted Wells to supervise a formal investigation. Wells wanted to interview McNally for a second time after discovering the “deflator” text. He offered to meet McNally anywhere, and anytime. Attorneys for the Patriots refused.
Tom Brady gave nothing of special value to the deflategate flunkies when he handed them autographed memorabilia: McNally didn’t receive any ordinary headshot scrawled with magic marker. McNally—with Brady present—was handed a signed, game-worn Tom Brady jersey. A similar jersey sold for more than $45,000 in 2012. John Jastremski, meanwhile, proudly claimed he was in possession of the very ball Brady threw to surpass the historic 50,000–yard mark, though he later said he was lying about that.
Three of the four tested Colts balls were also in violation of the psi requirement: On three of eight measurements, the Colts balls were fractionally lower than the required 12.5 pounds per square inch (psi), and at exactly the level anticipated by the Patriots’ own deflation theory—i.e., that starting out in a locker room and getting colder outdoors can marginally shrink a football. Eleven Patriots footballs on all 22 measurements, meanwhile, were well below regulation psi. None of the gathered referees and none of the summoned senior NFL officials—not one—thought any of the Colts footballs needed a single puff of air to be certified for second-half play. In sum: Every Colts football was legal; every Patriots football that was tested was illegal.
Referee Walt Anderson is unsure which of two gauges he used to measure psi of the footballs prior to the AFC Championship Game kickoff. Of the attempts to throw sand in the public’s eyes, this is the only one that is at all jury-worthy. (Though not, I think, arbitrator-worthy.) Whichever gauge Anderson used, he is adamant that the Patriots pre-game ball was at 12.5 psi, and the Colts ball closer to 13—exactly in line with each team’s stated preference. The two gauges in question, however, were slightly “off” relative to one another—one consistently read 0.3 to 0.4 higher psi than the other. It is very likely Anderson used the more accurate gauge, as he firmly recalls the footballs as set at the team’s preferred psi. (To believe he used the “off” gauge, you’d have to believe it was “off” to exactly the same degree as both the Pats and the Colts’ own gauges, used to set footballs precisely to their respective quarterbacks’ liking.)
But it doesn’t matter which gauge Anderson used. It doesn’t matter because the Wells Report ran the numbers both ways. Both times its hired quants came up with a statistically significant difference between the drop in pressure of the Patriots balls relative to the drop in pressure of the Colts balls. Under both scenarios, that “delta” is not explicable by gas theory, atmospheric conditions, or discrepancy in game use.
Any claim that the status of the Colts’ balls negates the status of the Pats’ balls ignores the following: Game officials had been warned ahead of time about the Patriots using deflated footballs; the Patriots footballs were in fact deflated; there are dozens of text messages between two Patriots employees referring to deflating footballs; one of these employees initially lied about the eventually deflated footballs’ chain of custody (a protocol violation at the time struck the head referee as alarming); the employee subsequently lied about his whereabouts; alternative to intentional deflation, there is no explanation for the fact that Patriots footballs were more deflated than Colts footballs, or none that has survived repeated testing.
Finally, the entire argument boils down to: You hate us cause you ain’t us.
No Pats Nation, I’m sorry. I do not hate you because I ain’t you. I just prefer living in a world where the normal canons of observation and inference still abide.
Over all this presides the figurehead droning on about “integrity.”
A festering pile of shit from a sports tabloid.
EasyBigFella
Got 6? YUP
Yes, ignorant Patriots hating articles are all the rage. None of them really explain anything factual about this case and all blow spygate out of proportion.
That Metcalf article takes all the arguments and insinuations about the Patriots to new heights while discounting valid pro-Patriots arguments and insinuations. The WellsContext doc makes many valid rebuttal points to the Wells report. Metcalf even says the Pats should have allowed a 5th interview of McNally but conveniently leaves out the part that Wells already had the info but hadn't bothered to read it; or that Wells had previously agreed to 1 interview only. Furthermore, Metcalf is rewriting history with his spygate imaginings. Spygate was never about filming other teams signals; it was about filming them from the sideline of the field. It is legal still today to film signals, btw. Just because Metcalf says it, doesn't mean he's right.
My guess is that the author of this and perhaps you never actually read the whole Well's report or perhaps neither of you actually understood it. Just a guess though.
~Dee~
"Ideally, one part of the brain—commonly known as “the understanding”—limits the psychic distortions of sports viewing to a civilized minimum."
Metcalf's article proves his premise isn't unique to Patriot fans.
Metcalf's article proves his premise isn't unique to Patriot fans.
Big/Sky/Fly
370hssv vw6!s tu36v
If Krafty is in a lose-lose situation...why didn't he communicate that to the Pats fans clearly? He didn't. His message was vague and muddy at best. After what he promised before the superbowl, yesterday's public speech was BS. It made him look weak, sackless, tail between the legs, gutless and frankly, not very powerful. This is the main reason why so many people are pissed off at Krafty. He isn't a Patriot in the least. He is a prostitute and a hypocrite. He should have stood up for himself/his team, at the very least.
Even if doing that would be futile, it would have paid off for him in the end...respect wise.
If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Kraft did this multiple times.
benhamean
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Sadly, the owner of the Patriots essentially bailed on his one WellsContext doc, so (as awesome as it was, IMO) why should anyone now do anything but scoff at it?
If Krafty is in a lose-lose situation...why didn't he communicate that to the Pats fans clearly? He didn't. His message was vague and muddy at best. After what he promised before the superbowl, yesterday's public speech was BS. It made him look weak, sackless, tail between the legs, gutless and frankly, not very powerful. This is the main reason why so many people are pissed off at Krafty. He isn't a Patriot in the least. He is a prostitute and a hypocrite. He should have stood up for himself/his team, at the very least.
Even if doing that would be futile, it would have payed off for him in the end...respect wise.
If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Kraft did this multiple times.
Outstanding summation of exactly how I feel.