I think we all know how this falls down, in all seriousness.
The sidelinewallgate won't be a "gate," just like the other "gates" that never happened. The media won't jump on it. It won't matter.
What happened to the Pats in 07 was overblown to gargantuan proportions because of what the Pats had become - and still are - in the NFL: the single best team over the course of years.
We all know this. And prior to 07, if the JEST pulled this, we'd snicker, point a finger, and move on. And that's just what everybody will do, and just what everybody should have done in 07.
Sucks to be the Pats, because the lynch mob formed in 07 and never went away. The guys go undefeated the entirety of 07 until the Super Bowl, and the lesson most of the league takes from it is "18-1" as a taunt. Idjits were saying after that game that the Pats naturally lost because "they couldn't cheat anymore."
Er um, how come they won all them other games, by margins of 20 and 30 points?
So now the Pat are emerging in a very "parity" year as the team to beat once again. After years and years under the microscope, I think sanity's returning to a point. The convenient "reason" the Pats kicked everyone's ass is gone. Now what?
But there's no such "reason" to deride the JEST. They're not a monolithic, world-beating superpower. They're a team that proclaimed themselves on the rise, and got buy-in from the national sports media (AKA the local NY media with the widest distribution.)
They haven't won anything, and certainly not repeatedly - so there's nothing to explain away. True to form, they can't even make any noise in their own division.
So who cares if they're forming sideline walls and tripping guys?
What's pissing us off is the unequal treatment.
It's a compliment, guys.
I personally want to see another ring or three in the next few years (let's start with one, and not get ahead of ourselves.) The fading sense of "ohhhhhh they tape games, that explains everything!" will be erased at that point.
But getting "justice" in people's ideas of the Pats is never going to be primary to me after 07. The attitudes permanently established the sports media and the marching morons that follow them to be useless in my mind, particularly when it comes to assigning moral judgments.
They'll "tsk tsk" and move on in this case, and that's exactly what they should do. Nobody's confidence in the game will be shaken, nobody will shake their heads sadly and talk about how everything is now tainted. Nobody will act like Rex Ryan cancelled Christmas and pissed on an American flag, and nobody will write letters to the editor about what their 10-year-old is supposed to learn from this. South Park probably won't do an episode about it.
That's actually appropriate - and would have been 3 years ago.
