Can we admit to being delighted with DeflateGate? (It's a boring appellation but the leading alternative--"Ballghazi"--is tasteless.) It seems the most playful kind of scandal, an almost yippie-esque response to the regulated blandness of the National Football League. I believe and sincerely hope that the New England Patriots have been softening pigskins by a few degrees for years, that somewhere deep within the bowels of Gillette Stadium they have a secret R & D team investigating ever cleverer ways to gain minuscule advantages over their opponents. Is it too much to hope there somewhere exists a stammering, worshipful, bed-headed Q to furnish Tom Brady's James Bond with brain implants and high-tech contact lenses that identify open receivers and calculate the closing rates of defensive backs?
What's truly wonderful about the Patriots' gambit--if they in fact did get creative with the footballs--is that it worked. A softer football matters in subtle but measurable ways. Not only is it easy to throw and catch in some conditions, it's easier to hold onto. At least that's what Warren Sharp, on his blog sharpfootballanalysis.com, claimed to prove statistically last week. "The New England Patriots Prevention Of Fumbles Is Nearly Impossible" was the headline Sharp assigned to his first piece on the subject, and he followed it up with a couple of subsequent pieces.
(Fairness points out that Sharp's work has been pretty effectively destroyed, most notably in an article on deadspin.com by Gregory J. Matthews, an assistant professor of statistics at Loyola University Chicago, and Michael Lopez, an assistant professor of statistics at Skidmore College. But since Matthews' and Lopez's takedown does not fit the narrative I wish to construct, I have decided to--as I once actually watched a colleague do in an elevator where she was being confronted by inconvenient truths--clap my hands over my ears and sing "la-la, la-la, I can't hear you.")
So deflated balls make a difference. The Patriots are impossibly good at not fumbling. Brady is slinging a Nerf ball around while the opposite quarterback has to manipulate a glassy, rock-hard oblate especially ill-designed for throwing and catching (and anything else really, except maybe for breaking flankers' fingers). This is part of the reason they have been the NFL's alpha franchise for the past 15 years--this and their genetically enriched linemen from Mars.
It is genius.
Really, if they are doing stuff like this, I will concede that Bill Belichick (who I have heretofore considered a self-regarding bully who cultivates an air of disdainful superiority to compensate for his deep-seated suspicion that he's really just a competent football mind who has benefited from his association with the game's best quarterback and top-to-bottom organization) really is what the football hot-take-havers say he is, a brilliant mad scientist who sometimes reads real books. He is smarter than Sir Andrew Miles and Marilyn vos Savant combined. He is Warren Buffett times George Clooney with a pinch of Lord Voldemort thrown in for seasoning.
If he did this, I think I actually like the guy.
Now, you are free not to like him, you are free to boo and hiss and root against the Patriots. (But how can you root against patriots? Why do you hate America so?) The outcome of the game doesn't really mean anything. Which is why sports feel so good--you can invest everything with no actual risk. (Unless you risk a paycheck or an embarrassing tattoo.)
Frankly, I like it that the Patriots apparently tried to get away with something. And maybe that they have been getting away with something. It's a lot more fun talking about what a pound or so less pressure per square inch might possibly mean than considering the uglier implications of gladiatorial sports, the cost in human suffering of big hits and concussed skulls. (Not just a football problem--people are making fun of the blighted, tragic Jermain Taylor.)
It's a lot more fun talking about whether Brady and Belichick's respective "legacies" should be received with an asterisk considering the gray territories they've allegedly negotiated than to talk about the kind of blinkered adulation that attaches to young male athletes who can run fast and punish other young male athletes. We'd rather argue the morality of on-field "cheating" than consider a culture that, from childhood, coddles and entitles especially talented players to the extent that they seem to enjoy not just privileged status but sometimes immunity from criminal prosecution. No one's talking about Ray Rice or Adrian Peterson or even Jameis Winston now.
A controversy over whether a team was engaged in systematic deception in order to gain an on-field advantage ought to be received as refreshing by football fans as well as the humorless monolith that is the institutional NFL. Advantage-taking has always been part of sports, especially professional sports. Aside from golf (where I suspect cheating is far more prevalent than anyone is willing to admit), athletes and organizations have traditionally pushed the limits of polite sportsmanship.
Leaving aside the whole issue of performance-enhancing substances, players routinely bend and break rules to get an edge. It's considered part of the game. Some put sticky substances on their hands and jerseys, though Stickum and other grip-enhancing substances have been banned since 1981. Others might apply a thin coat of Vaseline to their uniforms to help them slip off blocks and tackles.
DeflateGate is kind of a charming diversion. The NFL desperately needs more whimsy. They should want us to be consumed by the possibility that the Patriots are a rogue franchise, a black-hatted organization willing to do whatever it takes to win. This might keep us from realizing that the Super Bowl has become a secular corporate holiday, that the NFL is a crypto-fascist organization, and that our national football obsession has all sorts of deleterious effects on our society.
None of this, of course, will deter me from watching the game.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 02/01/2015