Tom Brady, the disgusting, loathsome Michigan alum who has the temerity to strut around with his incredibly attractive wife and quadrillions of dollars and multiple Super Bowl rings, has been caught red-handed in possibly the greatest scandal that the great sport of football has ever seen. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Tom "Haverford" Brady probably deflated some footballs which probably gave him little to no real competitive advantage in an NFL playoff game.
I'll let the Grey Lady break this one down:
Tom Brady- one of the most accomplished N.F.L. quarterbacks ever- is more probably than not a cheater.
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Could Brady have thrown all those touchdown passes in the playoffs with fully inflated footballs? It's more probable than not. Will we ever know for sure? Now, maybe not.
For the record I think that Tom Brady definitely did this knowingly and in violation of NFL rules, but at the same time it got me thinking about some of the kinds of things that Ohio State has been accused of in recent memory. You know, the kind of piddling crap that people latched on to in the absence of actual scandal because it gave them a chance to stand up on a box, rend their shirt in two and bellow "YES! YOU ARE EVIL, I KNEW IT ALL ALONG! NO ONE LISTENED TO ME WHEN I SAID YOU WERE HITLER BUT I WAS RIGHT!"
Here's what Jim Tressel did: he lied to the NCAA, played players that should've been ineligible, probably ignored some (really minor) impermissible benefits that his players were getting, and I guess maybe rigged a raffle in the 1980s. One of those is a justifiably fireable offense, which is not, shockingly, the one that was used to attack his character.
Were you willing to sell your football soul to the devil to win games in Columbus?
Have you ever wanted to pick up the phone and call all those high school kids who chipped in on those summer camp raffles Sports Illustrated wrote you rigged for the best recruits and say you’re sorry? What do you think your children and their children think of you today?
WHERE ARE THE BODIES BURIED, JIM? HOW MANY CHILDREN HAD TO GO HUNGRY FOR TERRELLE PRYOR TO PLAY IN THE SUGAR BOWL? WHY WON'T YOU ADMIT YOUR ROLE IN THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT?
Urban Meyer has faced the same kind of criticism and scrutiny, mostly for shaking things up in an incredibly stagnant Big Ten with regards to recruiting and self-promotion. There are legitimate concerns and questions to be asked about Meyer's brand of roster management, but those kinds of questions are generally discarded for much lazier ones about Aaron Hernandez and him being "sleazy" or a jerk that's obsessed with winning.
In other words, we have to view cheating and being a cheater as some kind of egregious character flaw instead of a violation of a rulebook, because as fans (of any sport), it gives us the kind of moral superiority we need to write over a thousand words about the necessity of identifying an opposing coach of being a dickweed. It doesn't actually accomplish anything, but when stories like an opposing coach complaining about stolen signs or altered game film pop up, we add that to the pile of speciously reasoned evidence that we've tucked away in our brains that says this guy is a bad guy!
Actual, factual cheating is wrong in the context of sports because, you know, it's cheating. But even when it's real and legitimate, we've taken that word and that action and made it into a crazy morality play about the nature of a man's soul. We do this because cheating effects us personally; we feel foolish for accepting someone's story of fair play and hard work and then getting the rug pulled out from underneath us, so cheating becomes a crime worse than actual crime.
What bothers me about the "scandals" surrounding Tom Brady and Jim Tressel and Urban (I guess?) is that they're all ridiculous pea shooter distractions to real atom bomb discussions like the tolerance on the part of the NFL of abuse of women, or the economic issues of student-athletes, or the amount of adults willing to take advantage of teenagers through the AAU system to make a buck, or any number of things that result from the millions of dollars that football and sports and general bring with it.
My last example of what I'm talking about is that I made the mistake of listening to ESPN radio on the way home from work yesterday, and the point was made that "If hitting a woman is a four game suspension, then there's no way that Tom Brady gets any more than that." Which is a true, valid point, for all the absolutely wrong reasons. Tom Brady shouldn't be suspended as long as someone who hit a woman, because someone who hits a woman should be immediately suspended indefinitely, pending the result of the investigation, and not because we're trying to quantify and parse the difference between underinflated footballs and punching your girlfriend.
It's weird that Urban Meyer, supposedly the most cutthroat coach in the universe who would play a linebacker accused of high treason if he could get away with it, is the guy who actually seems to understand that any kind of moral stand has to take sports out of the equation entirely.
"Cheating" is wrong, but more than anything I shrug my shoulders at it because A) athletes aren't very good at getting away with it on a large scale, B) people in sports will do literally anything to gain a competitive advantage, and C) it's rampant. It's a nuisance, but it doesn't keep me up at night, even if my team is the one doing it.
But the biggest problem I have with being the boy who cried YOU HAVE PERPETRATED A FRAUD! is that we actively encourage said fraud by placing ridiculous expectations on human beings to pull off decidedly inhuman feats of athleticism or coaching on a regular basis, and get very, very angry if we don't see it. We can't beg players like Tom Brady or coaches like Jim Tressel to give us championships and bathe in the figurative blood of our not-actual enemies, and then act surprised when rules are bent or broken in the pursuit of those things.
Tom Brady or Jim Tressel or Urban Meyer or whoever may very well be disgusting human beings who have been pulling the wool over our eyes for years and years and years, but it's not going to be because they let the air out of some footballs or rigged a raffle or is playing slightly fast and loose with recruiting. It'll be for actual crimes with real victims, and if that day ever comes, the worst thing that we could realize is that we could've been spending our time exposing and stopping actual abuse and indiscretion instead of wringing our hands over the football equivalent of a corked bat.
