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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I think the idea that the NFL lets each team doctor its own footballs (within limits) is silly. Teams haven't been playing with the same balls for years.
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I completely agree. But I don't see what this has to do with anything. The NFL acceded to Brady's (and other quarterback's) requests to use their own balls as long as those balls met certain minimum standards. This wasn't good enough for Brady, so he broke the rule. And no one is going to convince me he wasn't instructing those guys to break the rule.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In particular, the idea that the Colts complained about the Patriots *before* this game and the NFL let things proceed as they did makes a mockery of the idea that they really care about the integrity of play.
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I hadn't heard it was before the game, but if they had, I agree with you there. Although, it seems possible that the refs were told to really check the balls carefully when submitted before the game and they checked out. And then they may have noticed they were underinflated sometime during the first half and checked them and switched them out at halftime.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
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Although I generally agree that 2 games is probably appropriate, here's the problem with your article:
"Almost nobody believed anything anyone from the Patriots said back then, and the only way to keep yourself sane at all was to remind yourself that this entire mishegas was over the amount of air present in the footballs used in the first half of a 45-7 game."
The fact that Brady refused to cooperate with the investigation is telling to me. I think they've been deflating balls for years. But at the very least, they surely deflated the balls in the close-fought, cold-weather Baltimore game the week before. And Brady may not be handling this well with all the clumsy cover-up, but he and the Patriots (and the NFL, for that matter), have succeeded in limiting scrutiny by everyone looking at this to the first half of the Indy blowout. Ridiculous. Like I said, a properly-inflated ball is much harder to catch in the cold because it's much slicker and harder to grip. The outcome of that Baltimore game could easily have been affected by the manipulation of the footballs Brady used.
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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
That said, I'm not interested in defending Brady, for the reasons stated by Pierce. I am somewhat more inclined to defend the team, again for the reasons stated by Pierce. The penalties levied by the NFL are highly proportionate to the league's desire to appear to be tough, but not to the gravity of what happened relative to other things the league has ever penalized.
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Agree. But you can't separate Brady's actions from the organization. And you guys got caught for fucking filming another team's practice. If the NFL is going to increase the severity of punishment for players based on past infractions, I don't know why they shouldn't with the teams.
TM
