Singling out the Patriots is Unfair

by Elliot
(United Kingdom)

Firstly, I must say that it was a poor article. Your writing style is good actually, it's just a shame that what is written is such trash.

First of all, I'm not claiming the Patriots didn't videotape the Jets defensive calls. There is conclusive evidence they did. The problem I have is that the Patriots have been labeled 'cheaters', and now one of the most successful sports organizations in the last decade has little to no respect left.

Morally, I don't think that taping the other teams signals is OK. I think it's wrong and so I can't defend them. The bit every pats fan is annoyed at is that tons of other NFL teams have been shown to do same and sometimes teams have done even worse (eg Dallas hacking into the other teams radio frequency to steal their play calls).

So my problem is that the Patriots have been punished severely whereas no other team has had a word said to them. The Patriots lost a first round draft pick (imagine how good we would be now! LOL) which in itself is a hefty punishment! This is the only time in league history that a team has lost its first round choice. Also (as if that wasn't good enough) Goodell fined BB $500,000 (that is a HUGE amount of money for what was a shaky accusation, remembering Goodell convieniently destroyed the evidence before anyone else could see it).

Finally they fined the Pats $250,000, still a huge sum. After all that, the worst part is that nobody thinks the Patriots deserves their success, when it's a fact that since Spygate we actually started winning more games! (From an article on nesn.com) "Record before Spygate punishment: 87-39 (.690 winning percentage)
Record after Spygate punishment: 49-15 (.766 winning percentage)." So according to Goodell the Patriots purposely made themselves worse! Brilliant logic there Roger...

Hopefully you can see my point. I disagree with what happened, we shouldn't have taped signals. It's just unfair that the football world has come down so so hard on the Pats when all the other teams doing the same thing or worse get off scott-free. How does that promote fair play?

Now I know you tried to counter the "every team does it" argument, but unfortunately you did a poor job. Your articles on this site are pretty good overall, but this one is ill-informed sniping. What the Patriots did was wrong in my opinion. but the way Goodell punished the Patriots and didn't do anything to any other team was in my eyes even worse.

This league promotes parity. Face it, they LOVE it. Nothing better than the Seahawks beating the Saints. As long as this league remains profit driven (which is forever) Goodell will try and bring down the most successful teams. Just saying.

In future, don't just ignore the contrary evidence.