TORONTO—The National Football League is a hugely over-blown, self-important marketing monolith that wrecks brains and bodies and occasionally reflects the very worst elements of our society—which, of course, explains its over-whelming popularity.
Hey, have at it. It’s a free world, and it’s your money. But for those who don’t grovel at the feet of the NFL—I think there’s, maybe, 20 of us—there are times when the level of absurdity is simply too much to let pass.
“Deflategate” is one of those times. Really, folks: The NFL needs to get a life. Let’s leave aside the myriad ills that beset the sport on and off the field—life-and-death issues in a league full of males behaving badly with no shortage of public and private abettors—and which should, from a neutral person’s point of view, be occupying 100 percent of the NFL’s time
Let’s also leave aside the fact that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has shown himself to be a large, empty, dictatorial suit with a tin ear for the issues hurting the people who play his game or marry the people who play his game.
Let’s simply consider a league that would pay somebody to put out a 243-page report that suggests that one of its franchise players on a marquee team possibly/likely/must have had a hand in messing around with the object central to the game’s playing: the football.
The truth is that there isn’t a sport where fudging both the written and unwritten rules isn’t an accepted or even celebrated idea. It can be individual (the choice to use hockey sticks with illegal curves, to scuff or load up a baseball…) or organizational (the thickness of infield grass, the amount of watering around a base to slow down teams, mysterious service doors in end zones that open on field-goal attempts, the way the old Civic Arena in Pittsburgh had screws near the visiting players bench that would sometimes catch on skate blades…).
The preponderance of security and television cameras has mitigated some of the time-honored subterfuge—but it has also exacerbated it. The New York Yankees had their catchers use multiple signals with the bases empty during their recent three-game series at the Rogers Centre, because manager Joe Girardi is convinced there is a camera some place in centre field and that somehow in the blink of an eye Blue Jays hitters are getting pitches tipped. The Chicago White Sox, of course, thought there was a man in white signaling the Blue Jays dugout. Two words for you: Josh and Thole.
Logic would suggest there’s nothing to these accusations—there have certainly been enough managers and coaches and players through this organization that somebody would have spilled the beans by now.
But it’s all a reflection of the fact that suspicion of the opposing team is a natural out-growth of competition, especially in a sport that has as little free-flowing action as baseball or, yes, football. It’s true that if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying to win; but it’s also true that if you don’t keep an eye open for possible cheating by an opponent, you’re setting yourself up to not be in a position to win.
The easy thing to say is that Deflategate wouldn’t be a thing if it weren’t for the fact it was about Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots—that if it were the Minnesota Vikings, the whole NFL would have responded with: “Huh.”
But is it really a witch-hunt, as some have suggested? I don’t know about that: I find it odd that a league would pursue one of its best franchises and best players and open itself to the possibility of de-valuing multiple championships because somebody’s nose is out of joint.
Is the NFL treating the Patriots the way some coaches treat their best players—being extraordinarily hard on them because it sets an example and strikes the fear of god into lessers, helping to keep them in line? That would seem to be too cute by half.
I prefer to see this as the NFL doing what it does best: running around in circles and making things up as it goes along whenever a “crisis” becomes public, then stopping to over-think the whole thing. Frankly, I don’t have a problem with a quarterback being able to deflate a football slightly if he’s more comfortable with it. Or inflating it. Since each team controls the balls that its quarterbacks use (which is in some ways a bizarre concept to begin with: let’s take the most important piece of equipment and leave it in the hands of some flunky or the flunky’s assistant), why the hell shouldn’t said quarterback maximize comfort? It would seem to make it easier to score points.
What’s the first thing a pitcher does when he gets a new ball? Rubs it up. Adds some dirt. A little bit of resin. I mean, if you’re going to throw the ball 100 miles per hour? As a hitter, I kind of like the idea you have a little extra grip. And unless deflated footballs are harder to intercept or hang on to on a fumble recovery… well, if Brady needs a little squishiness on the ball to make some plays? My thought is have at it.
I don’t get the Brady thing, either. He’s a winner, is fairly good looking and married a super-model. What’s to hate? He has had a difficult time taking this nonsense seriously—which means we can add normal, well-adjusted human being to his list of character traits. He appears to like his footballs a little soft, that’s all.
And now some of the taller foreheads want him suspended or fined because he has had a hand in something that everybody admits has gone on since the first leatherhead was knocked unconscious or the first bad military cliché was spewed by a head coach.
Some of them want asterisks applied to Brady’s records or those of his team. Asterisks? Take it from a baseball guy… you don’t want to go there. You don’t want to go there at all. You want to avoid asterisks at all cost, because now you’re trying to decide who is and isn’t a cheater and what does and doesn’t constitute cheating. That’s a no-win proposition.