Allegations that the New England Patriots cheated during Sunday’s AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts went viral within minutes after it ended. It pertained to charges that the Patriots underinflated game balls to make it easier to throw and catch in the cold, wet weather.
Here in part is how I commented:
The Patriots trampled the Colts (45-7) in a game that will be remembered more for an allegation of cheating off the field than for the execution of any play on it…
Even if proven true, the Patriots would clearly be happy to absorb the relatively light penalties as the cost of doing business. After all, a few draft picks and even a $1-million fine would be a small price to pay to get to the Super Bowl for the sixth time and have a shot at a fourth title during this Belichick-Brady era.
(“NFL Conference Championship Sunday,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 20, 2015)
Well, it now seems that not just this game, but the entire Belichick-Brady era will be remembered more for cheating than winning:
The NFL has found that 11 of the New England Patriots’ 12 game balls were inflated significantly below the NFL’s requirements, league sources involved and familiar with the investigation of Sunday’s AFC Championship Game told ESPN.
The investigation found the footballs were inflated 2 pounds per square inch below what’s required by NFL regulations.
(ESPN, January 21, 2015)
The prevailing suspicion is that, after the referee inspected their game balls two hours before kickoff, the Patriots secretly deflated them to quarterback Brady’s preferred but illegal level….
With this finding, however, the only question now is what penalties the NFL will impose for this latest act of cheating. After all, this is the same team and personnel the NFL penalized for illegally videotaping their opponents’ hand signals during a game in 2007.
The NFL should be guided by the fact that stripping the team of one first-round draft pick, fining it $250,000, and fining Coach Belichick $500,000 in that case had no deterrent effect. It should also be guided by the notorious misstep it made last year by initially giving Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice just a slap on the wrist for battering his then fiancée.
Consistent with my assertion about the Patriots factoring in such penalties as the cost of doing business, the NFL should:
- Fire all support staff involved in deflating those game balls, immediately.
- Strip the team of three times as many draft picks, and fine it ten times as much, as the NFL stripped and fined the Patriots for cheating with those videotapes.
- Suspend Coach Belichick for one year without pay, immediately; despite his protestations that he knew nothing about it. He should have known, and his credibility is obviously suspect.
- Suspend quarterback Tom Brady for one year without pay, immediately; especially in light of the way he initially laughed off the allegation as utterly preposterous. He clearly knew or should have known, and he benefited more than any other player from this cheating caper.
- Place asterisks next to victories and quarterback stats this team accumulated during the Belichick-Brady era. This would consign them to the same kind of fate that will forever call into question the victories and stats associated with notorious cheaters like steroid-junkies Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Alex Rodriguez.
- Deny Belichick and Brady entry into the NFL Hall of Fame for the same reasons Bonds, Clemens, and Rodriguez will never make it into the MLB Hall of Fame. Not least because of the unavoidable deduction that Belichick and Brady got away with cheating in similar fashion during far too many other games to countenance.
Of course, immediate suspensions would bar Belichick and Brady from coaching and playing, respectively, in the forthcoming Super Bowl. But I can think of no better way for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to redeem his and the league’s reputation (after the Ray Rice debacle) than to impose immediate suspensions.
All NFL fans are familiar with Goodell invoking the maxim “ignorance is no excuse” in 2012 to justify suspending New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton (for one year without pay) for his team’s crush-for-cash scheme (aka “Bountygate”). This, despite Payton pleading then, as Belichick is now, that he knew nothing about it.
And, just as pleading ignorance about the steroids he was shooting up to hit home runs did not exculpate Bonds (He thought it was flaxseed oil, remember?), pleading ignorance about using deflated game balls to help him complete passes should not exculpate Brady.
Finally, if these suspensions make it easier for the Seattle Seahawks to win, it would constitute only a fraction of the poetic justice required to compensate for all the games, to say nothing of the three Super Bowls, the New England Patriots have won under the cheating leadership of these two arrogant schmucks.
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NFL Conference Championship…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Wednesday, at 6:28 p.m.