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This is so blown out of proportion. But this is what happens when you don’t nip something in the bud quickly, and just deal with it. It spins out of control.
“DeflateGate” should never have gotten to this point. Some form of discipline should have been levied quickly to get it over with. Even the Indianapolis Colts, who reported the ball issue to the league, never thought this scandal was going on take on a life of it’s own.
Tweaking ball inflation has been going on forever.
“I’m just going to let the cat of the bag, every team does it, every game, it has been since I played,” former Jets quarterback Jeff Blake said at the Super Bowl to ESPN. “‘Cause when you take the balls out of the bag, they are rock hard. And you can’t feel the ball as well. It’s too hard. Everybody puts the pin in and lets just enough air out of the ball that you can feel it a little better. But it’s not the point to where it’s flat.
“As soon as they give them the balls. On the sideline before the game. The quarterbacks would come out to warm up in pregame … I would just say, ‘Take a little bit out, it’s a little bit hard.’ And then they’d take a little bit out and I’d squeeze them and say ‘That’s perfect.’ That’s it.
“So I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s not something that’s not been done for 20 years.”
That is why the basic penalty in the league for this indiscretion is just a $25,000 fine. It wasn’t considered a big deal.
Adam Schefter reported a couple of anecdotes today.
“There was one punter that I know, or long snapper last year, that carried a paper clip with him into games, and deflated footballs before he snapped them during the games,” Schefter reporter. “There’s a backup quarterback that would deflate footballs for his starting quarterback.”
The point is, this practice has been widespread. Now it won’t be moving forward because the league is going to monitor footballs very closely in every stadium.
But Matt Leinart put it best earlier this year – “Every team tampers with the footballs,” Leinart said on Twitter. “Ask any QB In the league, this is ridiculous!
“Actually my guy @kurt13warner didn’t tamper with the footballs because he wore gloves. Used to irritate me. So correction, almost all QBs!”
So you can understand why Brady is fighting this so hard.
Four-game suspension? Are you kidding me? For something that has been rampant around the league forever?
My big issue with Brady is him playing dumb like he knew nothing about it. There is no way the ball boys were tweaking footballs, to a certain air pressure, without knowing what Brady liked. That is why former quarterbacks like Mark Brunell and Troy Aikman ripped him after this story broke, and Brady made his first comments on the matter. No ball was doctored without the franchise quarterback letting the equipment guys know, behind the scenes, what he was looking for.
But the actual indiscretion wasn’t that big of a deal, when you consider it was going on all over the league, and game officials
were so often looking the other way.
June 24, 2015
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