Cheating from a different perspective

We've heard the names -

Cheatriots.

Belicheat.

Hate-triots.

The list goes on. And it will.

As I have noted numerous times, there's a certain sanctimony that comes from the fans - a righteous indignation that pretty much can be summed up by, "our team is better than yours 'cause ours doesn't cheat." Unfortunately, that's just not true.

Every team cheats in some way, on some level. Was I surprised by Spygate? No. Disappointed? Yes.

When Arlen Specter came forward with his press conference he revealed that his crusade had little to do with a concern for NFL fans or the integrity of the game. It had to do with the teams of his own home state. Pure and simple.

Consider -

"I have a different perspective," Specter said. "I'm elected by 12 million people., and a lot of them are Steeler fans. ... Frankly I'm incensed about what happened with the Steelers, and I'm incensed about the notes being destroyed. I really am."

So this is about the Steelers?

Not about the fans in Tampa, San Fran, Seattle, or Chicago. It's about his voters.

For all his bluster, he doesn't appear to listen to his constituents. The most important person in relation to the Steelers, Dan Rooney, doesn't think the issue deserves to go any further -

"We consider the tapes of our coaching staff during our games against the New England Patriots to be a non-issue," Rooney said in a statement. "In our opinion, they had no impact on the results of those games."

If the tapes had serious impact, why wouldn't Rooney want a deeper investigation?

Is he concerned what might be turned up that his coaching staff was involved in? Or is he concerned that the Cheatriot nicknames would stop in favor of "Steroid" City instead of Steel City.

For anyone that thinks I'm unjustifiably attacking the Steelers, mind you, it's not because I have a dislike of the team, or that I believe they're engaging in any tactics that other teams aren't already engaged in.

I do think Specter, however, should take a look at the fact that their sideline doctor from their recent Super Bowl was dismissed after linked to the federal HGH investigation in Albany, or that Steve Courson, an offensive lineman from the Steelers last two Super Bowl titles of the 1970's admitted steroid use before his death at the age of 50 giving a lot of credence to the rumors that there was rampant steroid use on the 1970's championship teams.

And let's face it, the mid-1980's Pirates cocaine drug scandal (one of the funnier ones I've read about), just more deeply embroils the city's teams in the rumors of a massive drug culture surrounding the franchises.

As I noted before - I don't think it's anymore rampant than on other teams and in other cities. But the investigation Specter wants, if its for the "fans of the NFL," rather than just for his purposes, needs to look into all cheating in the NFL if the investigation is to be unbiased (the Red Sox did not get left off the hook in Mitchell's investigation with 14 individuals who played for the team at some point and 37 mentions of the team in the report) it needs to be all-inclusive of the NFL. Not just the team Specter wants looked at.

What I think most people don't want to face with professional sports is that cheating is a part of the culture - endemic to the individuals that compete at the highest levels. Doping has historically been a part of cycling. When was the last Olympics anyone remembers that athletes weren't expelled from the games for cheating of some sort? Baseball was ripped apart by the Mitchell Report, and I'm guessing that was the tip of the ice-berg. And football? Performance enhancing drugs, signal stealing (both with and against the rules), and god only knows what else.

Yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, people believe that these people competing over millions of dollars aren't willing to risk a slap on the wrist and a $30,000 fine. Let's face it...that's just naive.

The Righteous and the Wicked...and other thoughts

"They are enormous role models for everybody," Arlen Specter (R. - Pennsylvania) said. "If you can cheat in the NFL, you can cheat in college, you can cheat in high school, you can cheat on your grade school math test. There's no limit as to what you can do. I think they owe the public a lot more candor and a lot more credibility."

Not like, say politics, where an entire administration and its party falls in lockstep in lying to the American people about reasons we should send citizens to die in a foreign country, a party owned by Big Oil, a party that has tried to distract the American people from real problems like the economy, war, human rights violations, and has disregarded the Bill of Rights.

No, politicians cheating the American people aren't going to send the message that, "you can cheat in college, you can cheat in high school, you can cheat on your grade school math test. There's no limit as to what you can do. I think they owe the public a lot more candor and a lot more credibility." Although if you do all of that, you might be qualified to be a Republican legislator.

No way what the NFL has done is worse than what Specter has done - ignored our President's illegal and un-Constitutional actions, ignored the questionable actions of the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and then has hoped that the citizenry would buy the fact that he has never met with Comcast and assured them that he would look out for their interests, despite being his biggest campaign contributors. It's less believable than Bill Belichick's "misinterpretation" excuse.

The would-be stopper

The Red Sox entered the final game against Baltimore on a three game skid and lost five of the last seven. The reasons ranged from a lack of clutch hitting, to struggling starters - including ace Josh Beckett and wunderkind Clay Buchholz - to bullpen meltdowns (generally from closer Jonathan Paplebon).

Jon Lester did in the last game against Baltimore what everyone expected Beckett to do. He stopped the bleeding. He left the game after six innings, five hits, two runs, and only 86 pitches. He left with the lead - 3-2.

The bullpen, Javy Lopez, Craig Hansen, and Hideki Okajima, conspired to give up twice as many runs in two innings as Lester did in six.

As responsible as the starting pitching has been for some of these losses, the bullpen was just as culpable yesterday (just as side note - this in no way absolves the Sox line-up which hit into four double-plays, left five men on base, three of which were left in scoring position with two outs. However, the offense had produced enough to have the lead when it was turned over to the pen).

Lester did his job. Unfortunately, the bullpen didn't - for the third time in the seven games.

Two-face...

Comic book fans know the Batman character of Harvey Dent as Two-face - the one-time Gotham City district attorney turned villain due to an attack that resulted in a split personality. The character is, in essence, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.

And it is evidently the playoff Celtics.

The most dominant team in the league during the regular season, and road warriors who dominated teams in the west in their own stadiums is winless on the road in five games this post-season and unbeaten at home.

Watching this team play on the road against Atlanta and Cleveland, it's obvious this is a different team than the one that shows up at the Gahden.

They appear flat and sometimes lost when they're in an opponent's arena. At home they dominate, and force the other teams into errors. But how long can a team survive playing all seven games in best-of-seven series after series?

The Specter of intelligence

Phantom.

Ghost.

Illusion.

Call it what you will, but Arlen Specter appears to be rattling a blunt saber and armed with minimal wits. According to the Associated Press, Specter...well, read it for yourself -

Specter, from Pennsylvania, cited the fact a Patriots attorney sat in on Walsh’s meeting with Goodell as proof the investigation has not been impartial.

I can't wait to hear how he'll be changing the judicial system because it's lack of impartiality due to the fact that attorneys for the accused parties are in the room when the accusers are testifying.

Dave over at the Coffin Corner has a great take on this.

Specter seems to think that a Mitchell-type investigation of the NFL over a rules violation is in order. Mind you, not something illegal like buying and taking banned substances, but over something that merely broke the NFL's rules.

He appears to imply that the investigation should be of the Patriots and how deep Spygate really went.

What I want is transparency on his part. We know what Goodell learned from Walsh. I want to know if Specter actually asked Walsh about his part in Spygate, or just how the NFL questioned Walsh. If it's the latter, then I have to conclude that Specter doesn't actually care about Spygate, but does care about doing everything in his power to make the NFL look bad and his biggest financial backer, Comcast, happy.

Here's the funny thing about Specter's request - he wants transparency? He wants fairness? Then a Mitchell-like investigation is going to blow the lid open.

No sweeping the accusations of "sound issues" in the RCA Dome under the rug with a cursory investigation.

No dismissal by the Steelers of a sideline doctor implicated in the Albany HGH investigation being the end of that issue.

No absolving and forgetting about the Jets and Broncos filming opponents - no matter how many years (Shanahan) the filming violation might be - or the Dolphins use of film, for which they were patted on their back.

Teams would need to get ready for every dirty little secret to be dragged screaming in the daylight - to see what rumors are correct, and which are just rumors. To see every little accusation of doping, sound enhancement, electronic espionage, and god only know what else, exposed to the public.

Specter's beloved Eagles wouldn't be spared. Nor would the league's "infallible" team, the Colts.

It will need to be all encompassing, and it will be brutal to the sanctimonious fans out there that believe they're rooting for teams full of saints.

No team, no team's fans are going to want this.

And from what I can tell, no senators have Specter's back regarding this issue.

Ultimately, all Specter is engaging in here is a distraction technique in an election year - a placebo to pull the minds of voters off an unpopular war entered into under false premises sold to the American people by his party, gas prices spiraling out of control, a housing market that's gone to hell in a hand-basket, and increasing unemployment numbers. It's what Bush did during the last election with the Swift Boats, it's what Specter is doing now.

It's despicable and he needs to be held accountable the way that he is saying the NFL needs to.

Everybody Loves a Winner

Is a crock.

The fans of a winner? Yeah. Bandwagon jumpers? Yeah. Fans of other teams? Not so much.

The more a team wins, the more others hate the team. Dominant teams get singled out for their faults, often in spite of the fact that there are things they do, or did, that are little different than the actions of the other teams.

Red Sox fans don't have a monopoly on loathing the Yankees. When the Mitchell Report hit there were a number of fans that were quick to point out that the Yankees Dynasty of the late Nineties was peppered from top to bottom with individuals named in the report. In the mid-1990's people reveled in the legal troubles of the various Dallas Cowboys.

That is precisely the reason why the Patriots are being singled out - and make no mistake about it - they are being singled out. Try to find out from Arlen Specter why he's making a big deal out of Spygate? Why he's continuing to do so, when everyone else seems to feel that it's a dead issue? Why the Patriots (who beat his Eagles in a Super Bowl) when no one has heard word one from him over -

• Allegations in recent years that both the Colts and the Redskins artificially enhance the crowd noise at their stadiums - a violation of NFL rules, if they are indeed doing so?
• An admission by the Dolphins' then middle linebacker Zack Thomas, after a 2006 21-0 victory over the Patriots, that the 'Phins stole the Patriots' offensive signals from tape?
• Why a team (the Broncos) that won the Super Bowl twice while in violation of the salary cap by almost $30 million over the two seasons, wasn't more severely sanctioned?
• Why that same team, caught taping an opponent's practice mid-week, once again, wasn't more severely sanctioned?
• Why the Jets admitted to taping the Patriots, but received no punishment for doing so?
• The 49ers weren't sanctioned more severely for their salary cap violations of the late 1990's?
• Why more teams aren't sanctioned for tampering when signing players from other teams mere minutes after free-agency begins? Who manages to negotiate and agree to terms in mere minutes with contracts that often exceed 100 pages?

And all of this is just the recent history stuff. An article in the San Diego newspaper from when Spygate hit, outlines some of the things that went on in the 1960's and 70's with the Raiders and somethings even more recently with the Bucs in regards to stealing plays and signals.

All told, the Patriots, Jets, Dolphins, and Broncos have been caught or copped to taping, or having tape of opponent's signals. The Raiders, and Buccaneers have either stolen signals, been suspected of it. And all teams must suspect other teams of doing so, or coaches wouldn't cover their mouths when relaying in signals. That's almost 20 percent of the league. Yet the Patriots are singled out by Specter..why? Because he wants to clean up the game? No.

Because of two things and two things only. It makes him feel better about the fact his team lost to be able to call the other team cheaters, and his biggest campaign contributor is Comcast, currently locked in a legal battle with the NFL in regards to the NFL network.

The Patriots cheated. But they did no more than any one of a number of teams.

And anyone that believes otherwise is being willfully ignorant of what goes on in the NFL.

The righteous and the wicked

As fans we are typically raised in our own particular denomination - Sox, Yankees, Colts, Penguins. Sometimes it's because of family, sometimes it's regional.

We've been raised to believe that there is something pure and good about sports.

The character of Terrence Mann in Field of Dreams concludes his keynote speech with, "And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."

The fact is, people that play sports - and I'm not talking about those of us that play pick-up games of basketball on Saturdays, or in softball leagues after work - no, those that were competitive enough to be in that handful of players to ever make it to the majors, the coaches, the trainers, these people are some of the most competitive people in the world.

They look for edges, often going out of the bounds allowed by their sport, sometimes venturing into the outright illegal. And this is not limited to American athletes or coaches.

Look at Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Barry Bonds, Bjarne Riss, Roger Clemens, and Lyle Alzado to name a few. By all reports, these people are the ones who looked for shortcuts, looked for the edge that going outside the bounds of the rules of their sport, and sometimes the laws of their country.

If you doubt how competitive these people are, consider that Pete Rose ended the career of a catcher in an All-Star game. A game that didn't even count.

The history of professional sports is a history of cheating and controversy, as much as we would like to convince ourselves otherwise, as often as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, the fact remains that there is nothing clean about pro sports.

The Patriots have Spygate, the Chicago White Sox will always have the Black Sox Scandal, the Packers and Lions will always each have a highly regarded player (historically speaking) in the 1960's who were both suspended for a season for gambling on the game. The Reds will always have Pete Rose, and Rose will always carry the stigma of betting on baseball.

Questions will always dog Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong. There will always be questions regarding the timing of Martina Hingis and the timing of her retirement in regards to an alleged positive test for cocaine, violating the WTA's drug policy.

In spite of mounds of incontrivertible evidence that pro sports is rife with cheating, we, as fans, get indignant over the fact that an opposing team cheated to win. We yell cheater(!) and point fingers, and try to claim the team that is the subject of our affections in a given sport is on some sort of moral high ground.

As a Red Sox fan, I always felt, from a public standpoint, that the Sox and the fan base lost the moral high ground on the steroid issue back in the mid 1990's when they added Jose Canseco to the roster. I felt it then, I feel it now.

Owners hold cities hostage, favorite players bail in favor of better money elsewhere, officials get nailed in gambling scandals. But we keep coming back, and we defend our teams with the rabid, one-mindedness of a pitbull. We are Crusaders for the Patriots, Giants, or Eagles.

Sometimes we are misguided in our attacks, sometimes because of misrepresentation by the press, sometimes because we are going to impress our preconceived notions upon a team we don't like, and have no desire for the making a judgment based on the facts. It is a religion, like all religions, based on faith and emotion.

And like religion, the government has no place in the games, unless the governing bodies of the games turn their heads and look the other way when federal and state laws are violated. For those of you who do, think about it this way - hypothetically, you own a contracting firm and are a member of your local chamber of commerce. You cut corners by setting studs two inches farther apart in your building than you are supposed to. Arlen Specter calls for an investigation into your business practices by Congress and compares your violation of building standards to illegal practices by the CIA. Anyone else sense the incongruity?

As for the Anti-trust Exemption that people claim give him the right. Let them remove it. See how football suffers. If football looses the exemption, then the draft goes away. The exemption is what allows the NFL to tell a player coming out of college that the Bills, or the Raiders, or the Panthers own a player's rights for a year. That goes away and the teams with the best profit margins - the Patriots, the Redskins, the Cowboys, and large market teams like the Giants are the only ones that can get the best talent coming out of college. Football becomes baseball.

Teams like Buffalo, Green Bay, Tampa Bay, Tennessee...they might as well kiss their collective futures goodbye.

As for Specter...this is a joke. His impartiality is questionable, at best, considering he's an Eagles fan and is pretty much tailoring his inquiry to the Eagle's Super Bowl loss to the Patriots, and his second largest contributor during the last election was Comcast, one of the companies locked in the legal dispute with the NFL over the NFL Network. He comes off more as a fan pissed about his team losing a championship than as an official trying to protect the integrity of the game.

And as a fan, he's wielding the cudgel that he he has - the Anti-trust Exemption - in a matter that was already handled in-house, as it should have been.

As for his claim that the NFL might need the evidence it destroyed at a different time, this isn't a court of law, nothing illegal was done. What need is there to hang on to evidence that had already leaked to the press to the embarrassment of the NFL? Specter is mistaking an in-house issue for something of the severity of baseball's steroid scandal, which did indeed violate federal law.

And people wonder why the Republican Party took a beating in the last election.

As fans, sometimes we need to temper our emotions. Sometimes we need to do a little footwork on our own, and not completely trust the media - they are, after all, in the business of selling papers and advertising. It behooves them to present stories in a way that will allow them the largest possible circulation. It's why the headlines were, "Pat's caught stealing signals," rather than, "Pat's caught putting together game film from forbidden location."

Presenting the story as taping from a location not allowed, but that stealing signals is...just not a sexy story.

It's why we'll never know what really happened with Terrell Owens just before the beginning of the season, but "attempted suicide" sells papers.

Sure, in our judicial system everyone is accorded the benefit of the doubt - innocent until proven guilty. But that's not the way the court of public opinion works.

For the detractors of the Patriots, this season will always be tainted - in spite of the fact that they were probably the most scrutinized team in the league this year, that the film was confiscated before the end of the first quarter of the first game and the NFL said that there was no way that the film could have been used, that nothing else untoward happened during the season. Those same people will always doubt the validity the 2001 win over the Rams due to unsubstantiated rumors that the Patriots taped the Rams' walk-through the day before. It's the nature of being a fan who doesn't like a team, or who resents a team.

But it remains the same for other teams that this happened to - the Yankees of the late 1990's will, in many people's heads, always have the taint of a large number of steroid users on that club. For some, it will always be remembered that the 1972 Dolphins were without a first round draft pick due to a penalty levied for tampering with a coach (Shula) who was still under contract with another team.

The instances of cheating and impropriety in sports are legion. And anyone who thinks they root for a team that's innocent, well they're just kidding themselves.