Several weeks ago, Peter King wrote the following:
I believe that by any measure this bounty scandal is more serious and worse for football than Spygate, which involved surreptitious taping of opponents' defensive signals, and using those tapings to gain an unfair edge in figuring out what plays the opponents would call.
I wrote to King saying his reporting (like that of so many others) was sloppy and inaccurate. Never mind that this is a wholly inaccurate description of what the Patriots were punished for. There is also no evidence whatsoever that the Patriots used the tapes in the manner described by King. And Commissioner Blockhead himself said NE
did not use the tapes during the course of any game. This was supported by Goodell's close personal friend, Matt Walsh, who said he had the tapes in his possession until the end of any game he taped. (As expected, no response from King.)
This is the fiction that has been established and nurtured by the press - that the Patriots used to tapes to secure
complete knowledge of every defensive play call they faced between 2000 and 2007.
It really doesn't require a lot of thought to understand that this is a physical impossibility. And even if the Patriots
tried to use the tapes against the very few teams they played a second time during a season (again, something neither proven nor even alleged), we've conveniently ignored the opportunity opponents had to change or disguise their signals, an obvious necessity since it was common knowledge that the Patriots were taping the signals in the first place.
That this sort of rudimentary analytical thought is beyond the apparently meager reasoning ability of Kurt Warner, **** LeBeau, Ryan Clark, James Harrison and others is a sad commentary on the collective intellect of the National Football League. Or, just maybe, it is a bunch of losers looking for an excuse, seeing only what they hope to see.
But that's the world we live in. If you repeat something often enough, pretty soon, people will come to regard it as the truth.