NFL's mouthpiece (ESPN) at it again with OTL piece on cameragate

Somewhere Mark Cuban is laughing his arse off and saying "I told you so"

Last I checked, the Patriots were part of the NFL. It amazes me to no end what the league office is doing to harm one of its own franchises and, by extension, the league as a whole. The owners need to wake up to this fact.

Galeb said:

I was the one who condescendingly said we have nothing to fear? Not sure how you got that tone from it...

Here are my points:

1. Teams have little they can do openly to fight back against the NFL.
2. I SUSPECT that the Krafts are fighting back by what means they effectively can.
3. I expressed said opinion while stating that believing Kraft if spineless is a reasonable perspective.
4. I also admitted that nobody on the outside has nearly enough information to be certain about their perspective.
5. I never once implied that the NFL isn't out to get the Pats.

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The Krafts could certainly do more. Every NFL exec should have a PI tailing them, then TMZ and Smoking Gun leaks with pictures and video of strip club visits, motel hookups, etc. There is no way the unethical and unseemly behavior of the league office is constrained to their day jobs.

The problem is crying and excuses are acceptable today in a way I've never seen before. There was a time when saying you lost because this, that or the other excuse was inviting ridicule.

Today, you lose and scream "cheater" "the sun was in my eyes" and everyone rushes to see if you're okay and give you a trophy to make you feel better.

Cowherd bashing this coming out now, says it feels like piling on. Trying not to sound like he's bashing former employer, but he is at least belittling the report

The Brandon Five said:

The Krafts could certainly do more. Every NFL exec should have a PI tailing them, then TMZ and Smoking Gun leaks with pictures and video of strip club visits, motel hookups, etc. There is no way the unethical and unseemly behavior of the league office is constrained to their day jobs.

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I would like to have seen them do more, but if they criticize the league or any NFL employee, they can be punished. They'd almost certainly lose a court battle? How else can they fight without making it worse except behind the scenes? I hope they're working to ultimately remove Goodell, and what I would prefer is that they actively search for and release incriminating evidence on the NFL. If they can find some damning proof of a blown sting and coverup, they could probably get their pics back.

For the record, I view Kraft's public capitulation as a very bad mistake.

I refuse to read this crap on ESPN, but just saw a reference to it on Yahoo.

This is akin to the approach employed down here when a police action results in the gunning down of a human being without cause to do so (and no, not trying to go anti-police or political with the analogy, just an observation), then the agency attempts to excuse the action by smearing the reputation of the victim through public press releases in order to imply the person "was not a nice guy" so no real loss here.

The action is either right or wrong. There is no retroactive justification to an illegal action, implying "it was morally right, in the grand scheme of things." The NFL and its ESPN confederates should just swallow the crow and move on. It might end the ongoing war of words and the fight they are so obviously losing.

Koma said:

Haven't read the OTL article, but from reading the thread, there appears to be a break down in common sense among the Patriots haters:

If NE was stealing the opponent's offensive play sheets and deciphering their defensive signals in real time, how did they ever lose? With those kind of advantages, every game should have been a blowout win. We should have seen a string of 19-0 seasons with record-setting offenses and defenses every year.

The fact that none of that happened should set off the BS detector in rational people.

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I thought there was always someone in the locker room to prevent theft of valuables.......and you're not going to let the opposing team watch your stuff.....
How could this happen?? You would have to have a team leaving their play sheet out and a guy finding it in an unoccupied locker room with not 1 of 70 plus people walking in.....cue the Mission Impossible theme music ..I'm also calling BS on this...

Tom E. Curran ‏@tomecurran 3m3 minutes ago
Commissioning this story and burying news of owners wanting retribution is, to me, worse than 11 of 12 balls report. So transparent.

Galeb said:

I was the one who condescendingly said we have nothing to fear? Not sure how you got that tone from it...

Here are my points:

1. Teams have little they can do openly to fight back against the NFL.
2. I SUSPECT that the Krafts are fighting back by what means they effectively can.
3. I expressed said opinion while stating that believing Kraft if spineless is a reasonable perspective.
4. I also admitted that nobody on the outside has nearly enough information to be certain about their perspective.
5. I never once implied that the NFL isn't out to get the Pats.

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Your can't fight the nfl directly excuses for Kraft's apparent inaction or tepid at best response don't apply to the media. The media are not the nfl or or nfl employees. They are a rich target environment. An occasional press release or besotted demand for an apology is ineffective, especially when juxtaposed with recantations and pictures hugging the very guys kicking your ass.

YOUGOTMOSSED said:

Here's the legal definition of defamation:

defamation
n. the act of making untrue statements about another which damages his/her reputation. If the defamatory statement is printed or broadcast over the media it is libel and, if only oral, it is slander. Public figures, including officeholders and candidates, have to show that the defamation was made with malicious intent and was not just fair comment. Damages for slander may be limited to actual (special) damages unless there is malice. Some statements such as an accusation of having committed a crime, having a feared disease or being unable to perform one's occupation are called libel per se or slander per se and can more easily lead to large money awards in court and even punitive damage recovery by the person harmed. Most states provide for a demand for a printed retraction of defamation and only allow a lawsuit if there is no such admission of error.



Read more: http://dictionary.law.com/default.aspx?selected=458#ixzz3l9yPFO7x

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Exactly, as the definition says. You would have to prove intentional malice, as in they knew the statements were untrue, but said them anyway.

Unless there are emails or some kind of record showing that malice. The case would never succeed.

SVN said:

Tom E. Curran ‏@tomecurran 3m3 minutes ago
Commissioning this story and burying news of owners wanting retribution is, to me, worse than 11 of 12 balls report. So transparent.

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He's right. If the NFL commissioned these reports (the espn story and the si story, which came out today within hours of each other), and it turns out that the Deflategate story was pushed by owners who were bitter about Spygate, well, that's HUMONGOUS news.

It means that Deflategate - something with zero evidence behind it - was begun (by two bitter opponents, the Ravens and Colts) and pushed by the opponents of the Patriots as an attempt to get revenge on them for their success, something they believed (but have nothing to prove it) was based largely on cheating.

PatsWickedPissah said:

Your can't fight the nfl directly excuses for Kraft's apparent inaction or tepid at best response don't apply to the media. The media are not the nfl or or nfl employees. They are a rich target environment. An occasional press release or besotted demand for an apology is ineffective, especially when juxtaposed with recantations and pictures hugging the very guys kicking your ass.

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I agree, but fighting the media openly could get ugly. Though I wonder how much uglier it could actually get for the Pats. That said, if you were ultimately able to purge the NFL's corruption, the war with the media would go on. I'm not sure if the potential rewards would be worth the cost.

I truly don't know what I'd do in the Kraft's position. I would probably either go totally nuclear or sell the team. I would find the covert and underhanded ******** intolerable.

Tunescribe said:

Last I checked, the Patriots were part of the NFL. It amazes me to no end what the league office is doing to harm one of its own franchises and, by extension, the league as a whole. The owners need to wake up to this fact.

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Some of the owners are probably directing it.

unoriginal said:

Some of the owners are probably directing it.

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And why not? Kraft's already shown that he's more interested in protecting the shield than he is his own franchise. Give him a choice between the 2 and he'll throw everyone and everything under the bus to keep his precious shield from getting dinged.

Galeb said:

I truly don't know what I'd do in the Kraft's position. I would probably either go totally nuclear or sell the team. I would find the covert and underhanded ******** intolerable.

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Yes, the BS storm would not be worth it to me.
I would let my son decide if it seemed worth it to him.

OK. Here's how I understand this.

Basically Belichick exploited the system to its full limits and turned what was then a legal system of taping opposing teams signals into a science. That's the material the NFL supposedly helped the Patriots destroy because it would have pissed the other owners off so much if they had seen it. Not because it was illicit, but because it was so good.

That part is analogous to the plays he called against the Ravens in the Divisional Round this year. He took the rule book and exploited it to the limits. He was just better and smarter than everyone else in the early 2000's and he continued being smarter than everyone else in 2015.

But, Belichick made a boneheaded and arguably arrogant mistake and continued taping from the sidelines in 2007 after the League Memorandum said that all teams should stop. He could have done the same taping by springing for a seat in the front row of the stands and it would have been legal, but he did it from the sidelines and that was against the memo. He then compounded his mistake by trying to say he had interpreted the League Memorandum in a certain way and all hell broke loose. Whether or not a dozen other teams were still doing the same thing was irrelevant...the three time SB winners were doing it and that was a crime.

That opened the floodgates for lies, innuendo and false accusations by other teams who were simply outplayed and outsmarted by the Patriots and just plain jealous.

Goodell was attacked by jealous owners and media for letting the Patriots "off the hook" (presumably by not suspending BB for a season as he would later do to Sean Payton), not for doing anything illegal, but just for being smarter than nearly everybody else.

Fast forward to 2015. Kensil and Pagano, without any understanding of the Ideal Gas Law, try to nail the Patriots for an "infraction" that can be explained by the laws of physics.

Kensil leaks a lie to Mort. The whole thing takes on a life of its own and Goodell is pressed by the owners to do what he didn't do in 2007, which is unfairly punish the Patriots for something they didn't do.

So, the bottom line is that Goodell tried to get away with punishing the Patriots for something they didn't do because the owners feel he should have done that eight years ago.

And, they would have gotten away with it, if not for a guy named Richard Berman, who saw through the whole thing.

There's a rumor out there that BB can secretly read people's minds and can speak to his players telepathetically.

There is another report that Tom Brady has the ability to stop time during an offensive play which is the only reason to explain his great pocket awareness.

http://www.csnne.com/new-england-patriots/ESPN: Deflategate penalties were 'makeup call' for Spygate

Those quotes are buried in the final paragraphs of the story which -- to be blunt -- is an embarrassingly transparent effort by ESPN to egg the Patriots franchise prior to Thursday night’s opener.

ESPN has an armada of insiders and reporters, and they all have their own sources and viewpoints. The report that spawned national outrage in January -- that 11 of 12 Patriots footballs were underinflated by as much as two psi -- came from ESPN’s Chris Mortensen. The network recently apologized (in the wee hours of a weekday morning) for falsely reporting the Patriots taped a Super Bowl XXXVI walkthrough by the St. Louis Rams. Their legal analysis from Lester Munson throughout the last month was stridently anti-Patriots . . . and knee-bucklingly wrong. And even the highly-respected Bob Ley’s tone in discussing the story was seen to be accusatory, condescending and -- it turns out -- uninformed.

While ESPN Boston’s Mike Reiss and the dean of information purveyors, Adam Schefter, have kept things objective, that hasn’t stopped significant blowback from the New England fan base and the Patriots as the story carried on.

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PatsFanSince74 said:

So, the bottom line is that Goodell tried to get away with punishing the Patriots for something they didn't do because the owners feel he should have done that eight years ago.

And, they would have gotten away with it, if not for a guy named Richard Berman, who saw through the whole thing.

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No, they DID get away with it. They may not have gotten the suspension, but they still permanently ruined the reputation of the Pats' greatest player, and they got all the sanctions against the team they wanted. During the process, the execs in the league office, Goodell included, despite looking like inept buffoons from the outside, actually have more supporters with the 32 than they ever had before.

The best part is they have every incentive to do it again.