Van Everyman said:To play devils advocate, other than it not being in the Wells Report, who's to say they haven't told the Patriots to knock it off before? Or knock something off?
I continue to be interested by the number of reputational complaints about the Patriots – from Bedard's GB claim and owners saying the league "had enough on them," to the stories about stolen playbook and even that crazy-ass paranoid article on Yahoo Sports back in February about the positioning of the Jumbotron at Gillette. The sheer volume of these complaints is literally the only thing that gives me pause about any of this as a Pats fan, including the texts which I don't think suggest much less prove a thing: the fact that there seems to be such certainty around the league that the Patriots are institutional cheaters and where there is smoke there must be fire.
Look at the leaks that came out with blatantly false infomation on this case. And you then think the NFL is covering up on all these other things they know about? Why? Because they don't want to smear the Patriots? I can't see how you can think that based on what happened in this case.
More likely that their sustained success over such a long period has everyone seeing ghosts.
- Communication systems fail all the time, it's not that irregular. But when it happens in Foxboro? Cheating!
- Ball feels a little squishy during a cold game. Due to physics, this happens in literally every cold weather game where the ball was inflated properly beforehand. But it happened in Foxboro? Cheating!
- Legal formations that you weren't prepared for? In Detroit? Yawn. In Foxboro? Cheating!
I mean, how many things have you heard complaints about over the past 15 years concerning the Patriots, but hear zero about in other places? Off the top of my head...
- Secondary makes too much contact
- Quick snap and hurry up offense is cheap
- Legal formations are "deceptive"
- Player passes concussion protocol, but it should have been tougher
- XP changes introduced to give Patriots an advantage
- Fake timeouts confuse kickers
- The tuck rule, despite the rule being called correctly as written and not even being called by the Pats (this was listed as a Patriots "scandal" by ABC for fuck's sake)
- "Mysterious" occasional communication outages
- Football air pressure
- Jumbotron replays
I mean, honestly, does anyone doubt that if any team besides the Patriots pulled those formations to help win a playoff game, they'd have been verbally blown by the media for their ingenuity? Imagine if the roles were reversed and the Ravens used them to beat the Patriots. Do you think anyone even utters the thought that it's dishonest or cheating? Of course not.
The bottom line is that if you want to see something, you'll see it. The most likely reason that none of these claims have stuck or even been made public is because they're bullshit and wouldn't hold up to an ounce of scrutiny. Where there's smoke, there's fire...or a smoke machine running behind the scenes.