I don’t really want to argue about it, but there were several things in your original comment that triggered my response and triggered me enough I want to clarify a little more.
Generally I dislike assumptions. It’s too easy to go astray if they’re wrong. It leads to conversations going off the rails a lot, often just from arguing about the assumptions themselves and that adds no real value.
Even more, I dislike drawing conclusions from assumptions. When you state a conclusion you’re making a stronger statement than just stating an assumption. But it depends on the underlying assumption being right, so that’s a potential,pitfall. And you’ve got another pitfall, if your conclusions are arguable. Again, I’m not looking to argue but I don’t accept your assertion that there are only two ways to interpret it.
All that isn’t even the biggest problem for me though. I really, REALLY, REALLY don’t like claims of knowing how a player is thinking or feeling, or worse how they *should* be thinking or feeling. It presumes too much about their values and value systems and overall psychology to be reliable. The only things we know are what the player says, but even then it’s very limited. We know Gonzo said he’s frustrated but we don’t know if he’s frustrated because the goalposts keep moving (we don’t know that, it’s just an example of one possibility) or if he’s frustrated because his agent told him it would be easy and get done as soon as Witherspoon signed and it hasn’t been, or what. So we’ve got to be real careful about projecting thoughts and feelings that Gonzo may or may not have, just projecting them because they’re what we would have, or think he should have. And then we assume that’s reality when it’s not, and again the whole conversation gets wrapped around the axle.
Final point on all this is that we have many self serving commentators offering their take on it all. None of them except Gonzo, his agent team, and the Pats FO have any real knowledge. Everybody else is repeating something they’ve heard someone else say, or they are making **** up themselves based on what they have heard other people say plus their own assumptions and projections. Everything coming from the Pats FO (including Kraft), Gonzo, or Gonzo’s agents, comes from someone with a dog in the fight, an axe to grind. That’s all going to be slanted, biased, selective, incomplete, and therefore unreliable. Everything else is even less reliable. So reports about whether the Pats are unwilling to match Witherspoon’s deal, or unwilling to match Stingley’s deal, really have to be taken with a grain of salt. Remember that the reporters putting those stories out are paid for the eyeballs their content attracts, not the veracity of that content.
So take everything I said earlier and consider that your post that bothers me rests on assumptions about the veracity of two articles of the content I just showed to be unreliable and hopefully you’ll see why I don’t think you should draw conclusions and then project Gonzo’s thoughts and feelings from it. Like I said, I don’t really want to argue about it, I really think that what I just discussed in the previous paragraph about unreliable information sources makes it impossible to know enough to have a good foundation for discussion. That’s why I said it was really moot.
