 |
| Cartoon by Gary Varvel, Indianapolis Star |
But then a Colts beat writer broke a story that the league was looking into some irregularities with game balls supplied by the Patriots, and all hell breaks loose. Welcome to Deflategate, or Deflateghazi, or find some other ironic idiom to describe it. The most needless and ridiculous scandal imaginable breaks, and Super Bowl hype week suddenly becomes interesting.
And let me point out something here, lest you think the Colts scribe breaking this was some act of sour grapes: NFL beat writers generally don’t report on standard NFL operating procedures. They aren’t really news. For example, it’s standard practice after an NFL game for a team to submit what is essentially a list of grievances from the week before – plays where officials, in their minds, got the calls wrong. This happens all the time, and it’s actually part of quality control operations, and it’s rarely a big deal. But it becomes a big deal, for example, when the Lions appear to get jobbed, after which it is then reported, in the media, of the NFL officers going through the game tape and finding all of the instances throughout the game where the Cowboys appeared to get jobbed. All of a sudden, the machinations of the league are back under the microscope. But those sorts of reviews happen all the time, and it’s not newsworthy when one team wins 52:0 or some such thing. And it’s not necessarily anything out of the ordinary that a football has to be taken out of play, or has to be reinflated at the half, or something of that sort. Stuff happens during the game. You see all the time, in baseball, a pitcher who doesn’t like a baseball tossing it back to be taken out of play. A couple of footballs losing some air wouldn’t have been a big deal. The Colts beat writer almost certainly had something more important to write about on his deadline, something along the lines of how the Colts played like the suckiest bunch of sucks who ever sucked. He wouldn’t have followed the smoke if he didn’t think there was fire.
Sure enough, it’s been discovered that 11 of 12 New England footballs were underinflated in the range of 2 lbs. per square inch. And now all of us are attempting to dabble the black magic arts of sport science to understand this. I’m not a physicist, nor do I play one on TV, but here goes. Each team supplies a dozen footballs for their offense to use during the game. The football has to be inflated to 12.5-13.5 PSI and weigh 14-15 oz. (A third set of footballs, to be used exclusively by the placekickers, are provided by the league.) The referees inspect the footballs 2 hours before the game and approve them for play, after which they are given back to the equipment staff for each team. They are then not to be altered in any way. Now, like I say, if 1-2 footballs come back underinflated or warped or what have you during the game, it isn’t that big of a deal. But 11 of 12 is unlikely to be a coincidence. What’s far more likely the case, in fact, is that someone on the New England side of the field is doctoring the footballs during the game.
So why does this matter? Well, a football with less air in it is going to be easier to grip. It will be easier to throw and catch. It will also be easier for the running back to clutch. This effect is magnified in cold and wet weather – two prevailing conditions on Sunday night in Foxboro. NFL QBs are notoriously finicky when it comes to the football. Some like the footballs inflated to the lower end of the allowable PSI, affording them “more leather” on the ball. Aaron Rogers, meanwhile, has come out and said he likes a harder, more inflated football, since he has bigger hands and it affords him more control. All QBs agree that brand new footballs suck, since they’re slick and have no good surface area to grip. Equipment managers will massage the footballs ahead of time, rub dirt on them, bounce them against brick walls, do anything to break them in to their QB’s specs.
And yes, you can tell the difference. You can tell immediately. A lot was made of the new soccer balls used in the World Cup in South Africa, which players had a hard time making dip and spin, and which goalkeepers had a hell of a time judging the flight of. The ball is the extension of the hand (or, in the case of soccer, the foot). All it would take for me to size up a basketball was a couple of dribbles – I could see the way it bounced, hear the sound, feel the surface with my fingers and a palm – and I would then know how I needed to compensate for it, making a slight adjustment in the placement of the ball in my hand when taking a shot. It’s minutia we’re talking about here, tiny little adjustments, but such is the extent of the awareness of your environment. Pitchers know when the seams of a baseball are fractions of inches off, hitters can feel and hear the difference when the ball strikes the bat. When handed a 10 PSI football on set, former NFL QB turned TV analyst Mark Brunell seemed almost shocked at how it felt in his hand. With the added grip, he figured he could throw the ball an extra 10 yards. Sports are played with the senses far more than most people realize.
And one of the disputed footballs on Sunday night ended up in the hands of the one guy other than Andrew Luck on the Colts sideline who would be aware of the nuances of the actual football itself – after a Colts interception, which the player then carried to the sideline, he flipped it to the equipment manager, who noticed something was weird and then alerted the Indianapolis coaching staff. This occurred during the first half of the game, and all of the Patriots footballs were then inspected during the halftime break and reinflated. But as it turns out, the Colts apparently had suspicions about this sort of thing going on back in November when the two teams played in Indianapolis, and the reports which have come out further suggest the possibility that the Colts were tipped off by the Ravens, who suspected something was peculiar about the footballs a week earlier, but who were too busy griping about New England’s weird offensive formations to publicly gripe about the footballs. The Ravens apparently took it one step further and complained to the league behind the scenes, and so Sunday’s reinflation of the footballs at halftime in Foxboro constituted the NFL’s equivalent of a surprise inspection. And as I said before, finding 11 of 12 footballs to be noncompliant, having been deemed compliant two hours before the game, pretty much eliminates the possibility of a coincidence. It defies all logic and sense that a whole bunch of footballs would simply be losing air.
This stuff is awesome.
Now, no one is suggesting that the Patriots won the game because of deflated footballs. The Patriots would’ve won using a nerf ball, a medicine ball, a bowling ball, hell they could’ve played with a cinderblock or a stuffed Thanksgiving turkey and still beaten the Colts. But therein lies part of the problem: if you’re the Patriots, why are you doing this? You don’t need to do this! You can beat the Colts six ways to Sunday. Just play the game straight up, for the love of pete. Why do you need to cheat?
And let’s not kid ourselves, this is cheating. Doctoring the football is against the rules. It’s cheating. Pretending otherwise is both emotionally and intellectually dishonest. Now, gamesmanship is nothing new in sports, of course. Teams have been trying to get subtle advantages on the opposition for years. Back when the Dodgers were stealing bases all over teams in the 1960s and 1970s, the Giants would famously overwater the area around the first base bag at The Stick and turn it into a quaggy, sloppy mess in an attempt to slow the Dodgers’ running game. Legal? No. Effective? Well, yeah. Some of the accusations over the years of foul play have been pretty entertaining. The White Sox accused the Jays of stealing signs from the stands. The Seahawks have been accused of pumping in artificial crowd noise. Various dome teams in football and baseball have been accused of adjusting the air conditioning. Most of the accusations turns out to be nonsense, but gamesmanship and bending of the rules most definitely goes on. We joke around the office about the extent to which cheating occurs in auto racing, sometimes rather brazenly, and how auto teams employ one whole group of technicians to help them cheat and another whole group of technicians to help them avoid getting caught. The cynic would suggest that stripping Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France titles is hypocritical, since cycling, as a sport, is dirtier than my closet, and the idea that Armstrong won simply by cheating more efficiently than the others is nonsense. Take all of the drugs out of the sport, strip it down to the basic, and Armstrong would probably win, anyway. But, in the end, “everyone else is doing it” is not an acceptable defense, nor should it ever be.
And since this is the Patriots we are talking about, it rankles people even more. They are the closest thing to a dynasty the parity-happy NFL can muster, with three Super Bowl wins and now six Super Bowl appearances in this millennium. They are a model franchise in terms of preparation, on-field innovation, roster construction, and reinvention on the fly, seemingly never missing a beat and winning at more than a .700 clip over the past decade. There is a fair amount of envy and jealousy in the NFL about the continued success of the Patriots, to be sure. But there is also a constant spate of whispers and rumours suggesting the franchise is bending whatever rules they can find so as to gain a competitive advantage, one which dates all the way back to their first Super Bowl victory, where they were accused of secretly videotaping St. Louis Rams practices. The worst transgression of all, of course, was the so-called ‘Spygate’ episode from 2007, in which the Patriots were, in fact, caught and penalized by the league. Spygate was a clear violation of the league’s rules regarding use of technology during the game – which is prohibited, other than some basic radio communication and still photography, all of which has to meet league-specific guidelines. The league has always maintained the idea that the game should be determined by the human element (a notion baseball would do well to follow, I should add, since it’s fairly accepted, at this point, that pitchers and hitters are studying each others’ tendencies downloaded onto iPods during the games). And they are pretty adamant about that at the NFL offices. (Just recently, it was reported that Browns are being investigated for staffers illegally text messaging during the game, although I am not sure what besides ‘OUR QB IS TEH SUX’ they would possibly be saying.)
While paying the penalty for this Spygate violation, Bill Belichick also denied any willful wrongdoing and maintained his club gained no competitive advantage. His response to this particular transgression regarding footballs, meanwhile, was to express surprise and, to some extent, throw Tom Brady under the bus, although I am not sure that was truly his intent. “Ask the quarterback.” Well, apparently, the QB has no idea what’s going on, either, so now what?
Something doesn’t jibe here. A bagful of footballs don’t all mysteriously deflate. We can again attempt to apply the rule of Hanlon’s razor here, in which case whomever is in charge of the footballs is obviously incompetent and should summarily be fired, but Belichick and the Patriots, rightly or wrongly, are already perceived as cheaters by a good number of those in and around the league. And Belichick is notorious even among the coaching establishment for being a huge control freak. That this pesky little detail about the footballs could somehow accidentally slip past every single person on the Patriots sideline seems dubious. Their reputation precedes them in this case.
And now the NFL is in a really bad spot. Roger Goodell has been perceived as being something of a Patriots stooge in the past – Pats owner Bob Kraft has been one of his most adamant supporters throughout some of the league’s recent trials and tribulations – and you’ve already got the Seahawks pointing out the absurdity/stupidity of the league threatening to suspend Marshawn Lynch for wanting to wear gold shoes, implying a certain level of double-standard going on were the Patriots not dealt with harshly if found to be guilty. The league has to get this investigation right, and has to do it quickly, and it is unclear, if not outright doubtful, that the NFL is capable of doing that. Previous investigations do not exactly leave people brimming with confidence. But this sort of thing goes to the integrity of the game. You just can’t have this.
I don’t see how the league can avoid coming down hard on the Patriots for this. Failing to do so would be yet another blow to a league that really doesn’t need any more of those at the moment. Fines? Loss of draft picks? Suspensions for the Super Bowl and/or carrying over to next season? I think all of those are in play at the moment. It may, in fact, be the last one which finally convinces some folks in Foxboro, and elsewhere, that the league will not tolerate this kind of thing.
What a mess. What a needless, ridiculous mess. This promises to be an epic distraction, and it’s going to be hard for many to view a potential Patriots Super Bowl win as being anything short of tarnished. The league probably just wants this to go away, but that ain’t gonna happen. Not at this stage, it isn’t. You’ve got every sports reporter in America descending upon Phoenix next week, looking for something to write about and something to say before the camera. Any guesses what Topic #1 is going to be?
And for the Seahawks, a brash lot who do not mind being cast as the villains – which is odd in and of itself, since no one outside of the Pacific Northwest cared one way or another about the Seahawks until they suddenly got scary good – this is going to put them in an unusual position. Dare I say it, for the casual fans out there who are reading about this stuff, are the Seahawks now – gasp! – the good guys? Now I know this is getting weird.
The game last Sunday in Seattle ran the gamut. It was awful and brilliant, it was exasperating and confounding and bizarre and exciting and spectacular. It was the sort of game which goes a way in rehabilitating the tattered image of the NFL – we were reminded, for a few hours, why we like the game in the first place. And if the NFL fucks up this investigation, it just may be up to the Seahawks on Super Bowl Sunday to once again go about saving the league from itself.
