Wit or Wisdom

Right before the Super Bowl, rumors and stories are swirling around the Patriots and their cheating, with a former Patriots video official, Matt Walsh, hinting that he knows things that he’s not allowed to say. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) is leading a congressional investigation (another instance of the government getting involved where they oughtn’t). Now, it comes out, according to the Boston Herald, that the Patriots were allegedly video-taping the Rams’ final walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI, which the Rams lost. This is only an allegation, at this point, but if it’s true, the Patriots are the biggest cheats in sports history. They will have successfully stolen at least one Super Bowl, with a long ugly investigation into more.

Honestly, the timing of all these stories coming out right before the Super Bowl is really, really, really, really idiotic. The Patriots are probably getting really mad about now and will probably go out and destroy the Giants tomorrow.

Regardless of timing, however, experience as a sports fan tells me that this is a whole lot deeper and darker than we want it to be. Or perhaps as deep and dark as we want it to be. The Patriots are loved in Boston, hated in most of the rest of the country. Nobody likes cheaters, and nobody likes dynasties, but everybody hates cheating dynasties, and the Patriots stink like one. While the prospect of cheating on this level appalls me, there is a terribly horrid part of me that wants to see the Patriots get it. Yes, part of it is anger at how the Patriots defense absolutely hammered the Rams receivers illegally and the Patriots offense tackled defenders again and again in Super Bowl XXXVI. But injuries heal over time, and the two teams are almost completely different. The real reason there’s a part of me that would like to see them get exposed as liars and cheats is that they have consistently violated the most sacred rule of sports, that being that you do not run up the score. It is considered degrading and insulting to the other team, prolongs the game past necessary length, and, most of all, marks you as arrogant. And one thing the Patriots certainly are is arrogant.

The NFL is either ignorant, foolish enough to think they can get away with it, or they know that nothing has happened. I honestly hope it is the third of those three, but I have a feeling its probably one of the first two. We’ve seen cheating on so many levels of professional sport in recent years, from baseball to cycling to basketball to running, it won’t surprise me even a little bit to see it coming from the NFL. I mean, after all, this league is so paranoid that they’ve mailed letters to churches forbidding them from having large Super Bowl parties and copyrighted the name of the Super Bowl so that even the advertisers running commercials during the game cannot use the name. If they’re that concerned about naming rights and Bible-readers, perhaps they have bigger things to hide.