Deflategate: Report confirms organized cheating by NFL’s New England Patriots

Quarterback Tom Brady, it seems, probably had knowledge of footballs being deflated. Maybe. | MADDIE MEYER / GETTY IMAGES

Where cheating is an organized system: “If employees of the Patriots could pull off cheating for over a year, get caught in obvious lies, leave text message evidence, impede NFL investigators, and come out of it with a report that cannot definitively say they cheated, then it raises some questions. First: Why wouldn’t you cheat, any way you could? Second: Who else is cheating, with their doofuses, trying to gain an angle in this merciless league? Third: Imagine if the NFL spent this much time and effort investigating how it handles concussions, and tried for the truth.” And, fourth, what if the criminal justice system was investigating this sports cartel, as the alleged offence in the “deflategate” is, in fact, a criminal offence under law, e.g., fraud, rather than an in-house, private investigation?

By BRUCE ARTHUR in the Toronto Star

NFL: A sports cartel without balls or integrity

By TONY SEED

Exempt from the rule of law by U.S. federal legislation, the powerful sports cartels rule their domain by exception. Once again the US National Football League (NFL) is investigating itself for dirty tricks. The articulate Seattle player, Richard Sherman, denounced it openly, i.e., without fear of fine, declaring that “it looks like a conflict of interest.”

For the past three years, the NFL has faced one “moral crisis” after the other involving organized fraud, collusion, violence and cheating of the health and safety of its players, constituting a credibility crisis that is part and parcel of the overall crisis of the American economic and political system and its institutions, with economic crisis at the base.

The latest crisis: Did the New England Patriots intentionally deflate the footballs used in the first half in the AFC Championship game on January 18 to gain an unfair competitive advantage?

Ethics: Turning balls into strikes with subtlest of motions and cheating into a science

US professional sports has raised cheating – the conscious violation of the laws of the game – into a system, as the following article by AP published earlier this year on baseball catchers demonstrates by negative example. Of their ability to frame a ball thrown outside the strike zone as a strike, AP comments, “Technically, it is an attempt to cheat, an ingrained and artful baseball deception as old as the neighbourhood play at second base.” 

The basic approach promoted is American pragmatism – any means to the end, the end justifies the means, winning is everything / the only thing, and everything goes. Success becomes the criteria of the private sport empires to discard basic norms of modern sport such as a level playing field. Such concepts as “selling the catch” (baseball, football) and “the good foul” or even “the good hard foul” (basketball) have become official and introduced into the everyday vocabulary of competition to degrade the culture of sport, athletes and humanity. It is little wonder that hooligan behaviour is rampant and the “major leagues” are mired in an unprecedented moral crisis.– Tony Seed

Rays catcher Jose Molina is considered the gold standard for framing pitches, which can help bring several extra wins | Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

AP (March 22) WASHINGTON — It was a crucial pitch in a game in the early 1990s. A fastball. Away.

When the ball hit Randy Knorr’s mitt, Knorr, a Toronto Blue Jays catcher, moved it back over the strike zone.

The umpire called it a ball.

“Fifty thousand fans in the stands are booing,” Knorr said. “I knew it was a ball. I was just trying to bring it back over. And he smacked me in the back of the head and said: ‘Don’t ever do that to me again. You know that was a ball, and now you made everybody in the stadium think it was a strike.’ ”

At that moment, at least, Knorr was no Jose Molina.