So in the week and a half between losing the Brady case and the season kicking off, the two biggest sports news sites have unloaded every last iota of paranoid, unsourced speculation they've ever dreamed up, all on the same day that Goodell goes on ESPN radio and basically admits defeat in acknowledging that he shouldn't be in charge of player discipline anymore.
This is so obviously a coordinated hit job that I can't even imagine how some people much not see it as such. I actually read the OTL article, just for the sake of knowing what random, unfounded accusations are going to be taken as fact now. It was all the same stuff we already knew. What
other people claim Matt Walsh and Arlen Specter might have said is being reported essentially as fact, with barely a paragraph mentioning that oh by the way, Specter's campaign was funded by Comcast and this all came while they were in a heated battle with the NFL, and Walsh was fired in 2003 and later outright admitted that he had no evidence or experience pointing to the stuff he was talking about actually happening: it was all just idle speculation.
ESPN, of course, writes the entire article in a way that drives the reader to accept any idle speculation--even that it later acknowledges has no evidence supporting it--as fact. This SI story isn't really any better. This might be my favorite part:
Some of the security measures are small. It is standard NFL practice for home teams to help unload equipment from buses, but one AFC team won’t let the Patriots do it. Other precautions are extreme: At least five teams have swept their hotels, locker rooms or coaches’ booths in New England for listening devices, sometimes hiring outside professionals. None have been found.
The Pats really are living in everyone else's heads, rent-free. And when they don't actually find anything, they're reduced to
literally complaining about warm Gatorade. It's really kinda hilarious.
