Patriots deflated Colts, with or without help
Be honest: when you heard the reports out of Indianapolis that the National Football League was investigating the New England Patriots for allegedly underinflating footballs during Sunday’s AFC Championship win over the Colts, was your reaction …
(a) Aha! I KNEW the Patriots were cheating, because they always do.
(b) I wonder if that’s why Indy QB Andrew Luck couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with his passes.
(c) If under-inflation makes the ball easier to throw and catch in bad conditions, wouldn’t that favour the Colts, who had to rely totally on their passing game because they couldn’t run the ball?
(d) Give it a rest. It was 45-7. Tom Brady could have been throwing that fish from Pike Place Market that they used as a prop in the pre-game show from Seattle, and still won.
Mark me down for (d), the seafood. With a side dish of (c).
Listen, no revelation of Patriots’ deviousness would surprise me, any more than I was shocked — shocked! — to learn that head coach Bill Belichick had ordered the secret videotaping of New York Jets’ hand signals in 2007, for which the Pats were docked a first-round draft pick and Belichick was personally fined $500,000.
But at a certain point, all the angst over the “hated” Patriots and their anything-to-win philosophy starts to reek of little more than envy.
The NFL, both history and current events tell us, is a veritable bubbling cauldron of deceit and dirty tricks. Like the New Orleans Saints’ bounties on opposing players, and the Miami Dolphins’ lockerroom campaign to “break” a lineman perceived as soft, and the Ravens’ collection of unsavoury characters from Terrell Suggs to Ray Rice, all the way back to Ray Lewis.
And of course the dirtiest trick of all: the one the league has been playing on the broken lives of its crippled and demented veteran players after using them up and spitting them out.
But where team loyalty is concerned, sports fans love underdogs, and so any team that has a protracted run of success — the Dallas Cowboys/New York Yankees syndrome — combined with the attendant high profile tends to bring out the worst in its detractors, a phenomenon that is exponentially greater, and louder, in the social media era. So that’s one factor. Another is that critics find in the Patriots, because of past transgressions, an easy target for their frustrations. Example: Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh complaining that in the playoff game two weeks ago, Belichick’s trickery in substituting players on offence — who reported in as an eligible receiver, who as ineligible — was shady, if not illegal.
Three times, they used a skill-position player as an ineligible receiver, scored a touchdown to an offensive lineman and another on a pass thrown by receiver Julian Edelman. In the Indy game, New England declared an ineligible player 26 times and again scored on a pass to a lineman, which is a pretty big indictment of the Colts’ coaching staff.
The truth is, Belichick is consistently swifter, more innovative, bolder than your average by-the-book NFL robot. Do you think he would have ordered a field goal on fourth down from the one-yard-line? Green Bay’s Mike McCarthy did early in the Seattle game. Twice. And his team paid for it.
Sure, Belichick’s an unsympathetic, arrogant, monosyllabic pain in the ass. But he’s also handsdown the best coach out there, which is why he has the Pats in their sixth Super Bowl in 14 years. Patriot haters can’t bear it.
Sunday ’s complaint would look a lot better if the story hadn’t broken in Indianapolis. The Colts, speaking of deflated balls, quite plainly mailed it in after a certain point against a New England team vastly superior in all phases of the game, including coaching.
It comes across as whining of the first order.
No one knows how, exactly, or even why the Pats might have been deflating footballs, if it’s true. By the league rule, 30 balls are submitted to the referee, two hours and 15 minutes prior to game time, six of them designated as kicking balls. They are supposed to be checked for weight and proper inflation, then marked and at that point are in custody of the ball attendant.
If the Pats were somehow able to tamper with them, surely the league bears some responsibility for not guarding them properly. That said, if they did deliberately let out some of the air in a few, or more than a few, of the game balls, they could be subject to a fine or lost draft pick or both.
There was that moment, at the start of the third quarter, when the game was delayed mysteriously while a ball was taken out of play. The CBS crew speculated that a kicking ball was about to be used by accident for a play from scrimmage. But no one nailed down the actual reason.
On Monday, NBC Sports — which will carry Super Bowl XLIX — reported that “several balls were removed from play for being underinflated.”
“First I heard of it was this morning,” Belichick said, at his Monday news conference. “We’ll co-operate fully with whatever the league wants to ask us, what they want us to do.”
Anyway, true or not, it makes for a nice little time bomb that is certain to be tossed around, ad nauseam, during Super Bowl week, a Festivus-like opportunity for the airing of all the old grievances.
Burglar Bill strikes again.