NFL should have handled this quietly
 

This is the classic mountain out of a molehill.
Should BB have been reprimanded and fined...YES!

Did this need to become the story of the century on a par with the OJ Simpson case....no


NY Media completely blew this out of proportion and Goodell ate it up and decided to use this issue to enhance his own tough guy image.


In the process, he has tarnished a great franchise unnecessarily, slmmed one of the greatest coaches the game has ever seen and punished the Patriots fans.


This totally could have been handled quietly without fanfare. Goodell even admitted it had no impact on the game.

Goodell let his ego get in the way here.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

And just how was it supposed to be handled quietly? It's not possible in this day and age to keep a story like this quiet.

If you can't stand the heat, don't cheat.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

It's not cheating, Mangina didn't need to cry like a little bytch. He could've stopped BB from taping without making a media mess out of it - granted, I'm not sure if that was his intention, we can't really know. But it's what happened, and it didn't need to happen.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

It is cheating, part of a long standing tradition of cheating in the NFL. Don't kid yourself.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

If you are admitting that this kind of "cheating" - sign stealing - has been a long standing tradition in the NFL, then why should the Patriots suddenly get penalized almost a million dollars and a 1st round draft pick for doing it? It would be like suddenly implementing some blue law that no one has heard of in 200 years and randomly arresting one guy. You effectively just disproved your own point. Congrats.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

At the very least, Goodell should have acted to control the leaks from his Office that fed the articles by Mortensen et al.

As for Mangini, I think he got exactly what he wanted and he had no desire or intention of doing it quietly. Now, as is often the case, he might be regretting it. "Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it."

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

Umm.....ok. They should get penalized because they were stupid and got caught. I just effectively proved my own point. Congrats to me.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

OK, you're an idiot. There is a difference between breaking a rule and cheating. You can prove they broke a rule, but you're point was that they cheated, yet in trying to say they cheated, you said cheating was the norm, thus effectively making whatever punishment doled out to them unjust.

Seriously, how can people not understand the difference between BREAKING A RULE and CHEATING.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

Exactly. Remember the Milloy tampering charges against the Redskins...

• Did they break the rules? Absolutely.
• Are the rules in place to ensure competitive integrity? You betcha.
• Did the violation cause an unbalanced competitive landscape for another team? Probably, but nothing that threatened league integrity (at that point)
• Does everyone violate that particular rule to an extent? Yep.

Sound familiar? Thought so.

In that case, the commissioner investigated. LEAKED NOTHING. Rendered a judgement IN PRIVATE (think the Skins FO got a nasty-gram about this?). Situation resolved. No muss, no fuss. Patriots not overly happy, but they got over it.

It could have went like this...

Commissioner investigated. LEAKED GENERAL DAMNING DETAILS. Team is tried and convicted in the media without specifics or the team's side being heard. Cries go out for heads to roll. Commissioner deliberates a penalty and LEAKS IT TO THE MEDIA (insinuating guilt). More cries from the masses. Commissioner hammers the team (though the masses are in such a state of indignation at this point nothing short of castration will be enough). Incident lingers long past its appropriate lifespan.

Sound familiar? Thought so. Besides the media, who is happy about this turn of events? Show of hands? Anyone?

Belichick thumbed his nose at the commissioner and got spanked. Play this right, and we would be discussing an "undisclosed penalty for a procedural violation". Play it in the media and we now have a league under seige.

If using video equipment is such a threat to league integrity, ya think the commissioner would have had the NFL security folks at the game...oh, I dunno...LOOK OUT FOR UNAUTHORIZED CAMERAS! The Pats guy got 8+ minutes of taping in while NFL security looked on. How long would he have lasted with a machine gun over his shoulder? Just burns my biscuit.

Goodell is doing fine as a prosecuting attorney, but last time I looked that is a small part of his job. He better hope that nothing comes out of the closet from other teams or he will have an unworkable situation (can't punish them now, can't let it go unpunished). It just didn't need to go down like this.

Re: NFL should have handled this quietly
 

I'm trying to think of a word that describes "willfully and deliberately violating a rule during a game"...Odd, it seems to have been excluded from every dictionary inside the NE area.