Ya, but that's only if you believe in science man.


THE PATRIOTS ARE MESSING WITH OUR KICKING BALLS!

Or like, it's often cold in Foxborough.

At this point which owners are still supporting Rog as commissioner? You could take a janitor, put him in charge of the league and the NFL would make the same money without all the embarrassment Rog has created. Back when he was tight with Kraft, he at least had a powerful owner backing him, but now?

ESPN tv like skip and dan lebatard are all over the Pats saying how damning their own network's report on the Pats are. evil empire in the pocket of the nfl. one for the thumb shut these haters up?

if 13.5 is 30% to be under 12.5 due to the weather, what if it was a 13 or even a 12.5% ball? i would guess at least half the games in the nfl played with under inflated balls. and prolly 100% of outside playoff games.

all I can say is thank god for Eli or these cheating ****s might have 6 rings

David Wade ‏@davidwade 18h18 hours ago
ESPN now reporting #Patriots threw the football that hit Marcia Brady. #Patriots #Deflategate #Spygate

lol. who did throw that? usually its Jan cuz she is always fin up, but that was a welt. Jan got a cannon or what?

i know i know it was a brady all right heh

Someone did math with those types of assumptions and claimed that only 27% of all games since 1970 would have been played with balls inside the spec window.
I haven't looked at it in any detail, so I can't comment on the validity at all, though.

From Florio, re: Mike Martz and Spygate statement

Ken Tremendous ‏@KenTremendous Sep 8
Somehow, this, from the "new" ESPN report, is evidence of cheating? A kickoff...was angled...toward the sidelines?

Ken Tremendous ‏@KenTremendous 23h23 hours ago
"Teams would just leave their playsheets lying around, because they were wide-eyed imps from Rockwell paintings. AND THE PATS STOLE THEM!"

I guess that means it's not cheating to hit a really good kick off, unless Marshall Faulk is back there to receive.

If they hadn't taped the Rams practice, how could they have ever known to angle kick the ball away from Faulk? It's not like they could have watched him trot onto the field before the kickoff...

Another great part of the ESPN article is the breathless description of the super secret room only accessible to Belichick and a few other staffers.

Do they think that other teams open their offices and film rooms to the general public?

I was referring to the presser he did earlier this year when Deflategate was just breaking. He touched on Spygate very briefly:

Complete BS, particularly the last bolded part. Estrella was faking his credentials and lying about what he was filming. Belichick knew he was doing wrong.

He's still tight enough with Kraft that he can feel safe until his contract expires (March 2018 I believe). It's been noted that in all of Kraft's scathing statements during Deflategate, he always mentioned the NFL's underlings or just "the league" in general, never spoke out against Goodell specifically. Now, ROG might lose some of his arbitration power for PR reasons, but his actual job (at least for the duration of the current contract) is likely very safe.

That's what astounds me. His job is likely safe, but what has he done right of late? I can't think of a single significant thing in the past three years.

Maybe his out of touch, unilateral decision making approach is exactly what the NFL owners can identify with.

Well he could have filmed the guy from a different position and other teams were filming the Pats guy. The Pats were punished heavily for it, we're still talking about it 8 years later, and most people still don't understand WTF actually happened and think the Pats were filming walkthroughs and stuff. So I can understand his frustration boiling over in that setting, when he certainly wanted to be preparing for the Super Bowl.

He was wrong to tape where they did and clearly did break a rule though.

He's got a lot of owners who hate the Patriots backing him. This is analogous to companies using their lobbying arm to get the state to regulate against their competition. They struggle to beat Belichick, so they're trying to get the league to remove him. Barring that, suspending Brady is OK too.

This.

Change the name of the "Hall of Fame" to the "Hall of Eli" and raise the entrance criteria significantly.

And the Broncos actually got caught filming walkthroughs and the league slaps them on the wrist. Is ESPN outraged? Nah, crickets....

A nation of butthurt sore losers.

Funnily enough, since McDaniels did it, that's a perception strike against the Pats.

Pats why your team sucks is pretty pretty pretty good

Yup. And that's why fans of all teams should be outraged. What happens if your team is successful for a long time? Are a bunch of petty, spiteful rival owners going to try to Harrison Bergeron it by lobbying Goodell to "get them"?

Hey, if the packers conspired to deflate footballs or ran a headhunting bounty program or illegally filmed opponents I'd be all for punishing them and wouldn't be all but but but you can't prove so and so knew such and such for certain. But maybe I hold my team to a higher standard.