Easterbrook Goes Wild

[bryant]

Gregg Easterbrook isn't going to let go of his Patriots obsession all season, is he?

Fishy, indeed. On Sunday, Sept. 16, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell went on national TV and promised he would get to the bottom of the Patriots' sign-stealing. Four days later, the NFL announced all videotapes and other spying materials compiled by the Patriots had been obtained by the league and destroyed. Goodell, who until then had been very upfront in addressing the Beli-Cheat scandal, didn't go back on television to say what the tapes contained; the commissioner has been in radio silence about the Patriots since the files arrived at the NFL's Park Avenue headquarters. The league acted in a hurry to dispose of damning documents, but has not revealed what was in the tapes and notes, nor said why there was a rush to get rid of them.

The lack of answers leaves several questions hanging out there. Chief among them: Is it possible the Patriots' tapes showed some evidence of New England cheating in a Super Bowl?

Yes. It's not as if the last set of tapes confiscated by the NFL was leaked to the media within days; the NFL would have no reason to worry that some random employee would send copies of the material to Fox News, would they? Well, yes, they would. Easterbrook thinks that no team could get any use of the tapes as long as the sole copy was being held by the league, and that's true, but that's a big fat conditional sitting in the middle of that field of smarmy confidence.

I feel kind of thankful; the best thing for getting over a big scandal is a frothing conspiracy theorist trying to keep it alive and looking silly in the process. But man.

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

The problem with sportswriters is that they've got to fill column inches whether there's something to write about or not. The great thing about this kind of column is that it isn't any work: you just repeat things other people reported on and then speculate. So it is more about lazy writing than genuine belief in anything.

CHB does this in almost every column, frex.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

I have very little opinion on the Patriots taping thing, but I've felt for a while that Easterbrook was an idiot.

For my casual "wandering the web" sportswriting I mostly stick to King Kaufman and Fire Joe Morgan.

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

Easterbrook's columns are very much like Jake "The Snake" Plummer's quarterbacking. Quality control and consistency are problems. Sometimes he is dead on, and sometimes he beats a dead horse.

[bryant]

This is no less true for his political work, of course.

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

It does present an interesting dilemma for the league if it's true that there's evidence of cheating in the Superbowls, though. For the rest of this post, I'll assume that's what they have - of course, this is wild speculation.

I'm not entirely sure, but I tend to think that this is a big deal in football. It's not like baseball, where you might catch a guy stealing from time to time (and the admission of sign stealing by the Giants in the 50s was met with column inches but little real angst when it came out a few years back.) Football is very much a game of deception, and if you know even broad things like short pass, long pass, run, you have a huge edge. So, in that sense, this really damages the integrity of the game.

The league really doesn't want to invite this kind of speculation. The NBA has to deal with contentions that it's run by the Mafia after the recent scandal with the crooked ref, MLB has a major public relations issue with steroids. The NFL doesn't want people thinking the Superbowl is anything other than the pinnacle of American Sports, true competitiveness from great teams. In that sense, they're well served by changing the subject as quickly as possible.

If they don't go that route, what choices do they really have? You really can't do anything about the past Superbowls. The Reds are still the official winners of the 1919 World Series, although that cheating went the other way, with the White Sox intentionally losing. Stripping the Patriots of titles would do what, exactly, other than keep the story in the news? You could banish Belicheck to the NCAA for life, which really pumps up the speculation.

Or you could do what they did - give a serious enough punishment (ouch, first round draft pick!) that nobody's going to want to bring it on themselves again, and pray like mad that the story passes once games start going. Which seems to be mostly working. The Patriots will have the taint of being the Cheaters of the NFL for, well, a generation, but opposing fans _love_ hating the dominant franchise, and this is way too good to ever forget. :-) But it'll settle into smack talk soon, and people will move on.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to the conversation between the commish and the Patriots front office, though.

I come from a masively different angle than most of Bryant's friends, I imagine - the Patriots are my least favorite professional sports team, before this happened, or rather, the team I most enjoy rooting against. But really, this is mostly good news for a true Patriots Hater - the draft slap hurts them, and now I have more reasons to root against them. And Patriot fans get the cognitive dissonance of the Barry Bonds dilemma for SF Giants fans - you don't want to say that your guy is a cheating scum, because he's awesome and on your side, but you can't really do much to shut up the detractors, because they've got a point. I can't think of a better curse to wish on an enemy fanbase.

Now, if they are dumb enough to get caught doing something again, look out.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The worst part of that column was where he insinuated that Crennel, Weis, and Mangini didn't have Belichick's success after they left because they no longer had access to his cheating. That was beneath him.

Anyway, i'll take frothy conspiracy theories over his tired attempts at injecting cheesecake pictures into his column. And he's still a better read than any of the regular ESPN or SI football writers, excepting KC Joyner and maybe Jeffri Chadiha.

[solarmus.livejournal.com]

Gah, there are a ton of reasons that the tapes needed to be destroyed (ie if the pats made notes on them on how to do x vs y, it's bad for team y to have that found out by the general public, and for the pats general gameplans to become general knowledge)

Am I curious? Sure. But even with evidence, it's not like they'd replay the super bowl etc. The fines, draft picks and general discoloration of the past wins is what happened and pretty strong.

(If there was evidence of radio communication with the defense etc that'd be important, for several reasons. I'd guess none of that so far)