When it comes to sports, honesty within the game is the glue that holds the operation together. Rules are what make a game entirely its own.
With this in mind, it is understandable that so many people are furious with the New England Patriots organization right now.
After the Jan. 18 conference-title game with the Indianapolis Colts, the Patriots were accused of using deflated balls. Eleven out of the 12 game balls tested were under-inflated by two pounds per square inch below the league’s minimum standard.
The reason this is such an issue is that under-inflated balls can be easier to grip in bad weather, such as the rain in Sunday’s game.
The entire organization has denied any involvement, but many people are skeptical. To begin, it seems highly unlikely that a prestigious quarterback like Tom Brady would have absolutely no knowledge of this, as he claims. He’s been such an integral part of the team that it seems highly unlikely something like this would simply go unnoticed by him. And we aren’t the only ones to think this.
Troy Aikman, three-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback, stated, “for the balls to have been deflated, that doesn’t happen unless the quarterback wants that to happen.”
Now, none of us on the Editorial Board are exactly Cowboys fans. However, when Troy Aikman says something, we listen.
The other end of this scandal, obviously, is the coaching staff. And when you look at wrongdoings in the Patriots coaching staff, Bill Belichick’s shady past has to be discussed.
As many will remember, in 2007 a Patriots video assistant was caught taping the New York Jets’ defense signals from an on-field location.
The end results of this were the Patriots being fined $250,000 and Belichick being fined $500,000, the highest fine levied on a coach in the NFL’s 87-year history.
With all of this in mind, two questions remain: did the Patriots actually cheat? If they did, does it really matter?
The first question is going to be extremely hard to answer without any proof. Martin Schmaltz, a physics professor at Boston University, has said there may not have been any wrongdoing at all.
Inflating the balls inside in the warmth, then taking them outside to be tested could certainly have lead to the balls testing as under-inflated.
However, the NFL has been testing balls for years now, and it would seem they would know by now that testing them in this way would lead to incorrect results.
It’s hard to believe a multi-billion dollar organization would be so careless, especially for a game that determines who goes to the Super Bowl.
The other question, however, is extremely easy to answer: yes, it absolutely does matter.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the game itself would have been severely changed had a regulation ball been used. As IU sports journalism professor Galen Clavio stated in an online interview, “I don’t think it materially impacted the game.” This makes sense. The Colts lost 45-7. That is simply not something you can blame on the ball.
However, Clavio made the point that if this is cheating on the Patriots side, we have absolutely no idea how long this has been going on.
And in that respect, this is extremely important. If there has been a longstanding Patriots tradition of cheating, there is absolutely no way to know how many game-winning touchdowns were caught because the balls weren’t regulation.
Cheating simply cannot be tolerated at this level of play. We can only hope the NFL will do some digging this time and find out how much of the Patriots organization is built on lies.
