Gregg Easterbrook - The Games Not Over: In Defense of Football

The Games Not Over

In Defense of Football

Gregg Easterbrook

Copyright 2015 by Gregg Easterbrook

Published by PublicAffairs
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951264

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ISBN: 978-1-61039-648-6 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-61039-649-3 (e-book)

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contents

O ne evening in May 2015, all three network newscasts led with the same shocking story. The subject wasnt a natural disaster, corruption in politics or war in some distant land. The story all three network newscasts considered the most important development of the day was monkey business in the National Football League.

An NFL-commissioned report had just concluded that before a playoff game occurring in rain, the New England Patriots improperly let air out of footballs. That made the ones clutched by New England players a little easier to hold than those used by the opponent, the Indianapolis Colts.

As kickoff approaches before a game of American-style footballfor the rest of this book, just footballeach side presents a bag of pigskins to the officials for inspection. The purpose of this procedure, in effect down to the high school level, is to prevent the home team from doctoring the visitors footballs to make them slippery. New Englands innovation, according to the report, was to doctor its own footballs.

Those familiar with the gridiron chortled. A few years back, I was football coach of the middle-school affiliate of a large public high school in Maryland, where I live. Before my charges took the field on a rainy day, I called the varsity coach to ask if he had any tips for wet conditions. Let a little air out of the balls your guys use, the varsity coach advised.

Did I follow this advice? No comment.

It turned out that in the New England-Indianapolis game, the Patriots won by a comfortable margin: the better team, they would have carried the day even if using a bowling ball on offense. But it seemed theyd done something underhanded and been caught. The scandal quickly was dubbed Deflategate, though a columnist proposed PSIcheated as a more elegant name.

The report spelling out details of how the Patriots were said to have cheated became a national sensation, leading to the evening-news emphasis. Compiled by a law firm, the document ran a numbing 243 pages. Included were ninety-four charts or graphs, 127 footnotes, a lengthy disquisition on the Ideal Gas Law and a number of pseudo-precise remarks, such as the note that ball P6 was not at 12 pounds-per-square-inch, but rather at 11.95 PSI.

Before the report, when word first broke that New England had been caught tampering with footballs, there was a press conference at team headquarters near Boston. Michele Steele of ESPN reported that 100 journalists and at least 30 camera crews attendedmore media attention than has ever been focused on, say, infrastructure renewal or finding a cure for malaria.

At the packed press conference, quarterback Tom Bradyamong the best football players of his generation and leading a charmed life as a wealthy, handsome athlete married to a gorgeous fashion modelstood up to declare, I have no knowledge of anything. Brady seemed sincere as he insisted upon his innocence. He knew nothing!

The report would conclude that the Patriots star actively directed the doctoring of the footballs, and his no knowledge of anything was a barefaced lie. Brady and Patriots owner Robert Kraft denied the charge with all the vigor that Luxembourg denies being a tax haven. Patriots faithful would perceive a vast conspiracy, and don FREE TOM BRADY T-shirts. Later, Brady would tell NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that just before he was to be questioned on the missing PSI, he destroyed the cell phone he carried during the time the footballs were handled. Brady contended the smashed cell phone had nothing, nothing to do with the controversy.

An absurdly drawn-out legalistic melodrama followed: testimony with stenographers present, high-powered law firms Paul, Weiss and Covington & Burling firing all-guns broadsides, and a 456-page transcript that made the 243-page report seem succinct. In September 2015, a federal judge lifted Bradys suspension but came to no conclusion on the cheating charge: perhaps by the time you read this the Supreme Court, the Vatican and the United Nations Security Council have weighed in. Goodell said destruction of the phone went to the integrity of the sportthough, in 2007, when Goodell himself received video evidence that the New England Patriots had illegally taped the opponents sideline, the commissioner immediately destroyed the tapes.

Now heres the rub. The first news of football tampering, leading to the no knowledge of anything press conference, broke about a week before the Seattle-New England Super Bowl of 2015. The NFL report concluding that tampering occurred was not released until well after that contest had been played, with Brady leading the Patriots to a thrilling last-second victory and receiving the Super Bowl MVP award. Had Brady copped to the allegations at the press conference, he might have been suspended for the Super Bowl. By denying everything, Brady came out way ahead.

Whether grown men are chasing footballs that have been properly inflated may seem too trivial to discuss, let alone to activate such a national ruckus. The over-the-top reaction to a rumor about football air pressure shows the level of American mania for the National Football League. Nothing about the NFL is trivial: for professional football is the most important sport of the most important nation on Earth.

Pro football television ratings crush all other sports combined. Twenty of the twenty most-watched television events in the United States were Super Bowls. Since 2011, NBCs Sunday Night Football has been the number-one show on American televisionnot the number-one athletic event, the number-one show. Since 2006, ESPNs Monday Night Football has been the number-one American cable shownot the number-one athletic event, the number-one show. In the ratings, even the NFL draft crushes most other prime-time television. The annual NFL draft is a television juggernaut: millions tune in not to watch pro football being played, but merely being talked about. And the 2015 Super Bowl, amid all the controversy, was the most-watched program in the history of television.

So the obvious reason the PSIcheated scandal struck such a chord was the incredible popularity of all aspects of the NFL. But there was a second, deeper reason: that the National Football League holds up a mirror to American society. Ours is an outsized nation, and in the NFL, the most outsized of athletic leagues, we see our reflection.