As a Boston area guy who doesn't follow sports very closely at all (and who prefers baseball and hockey to football), I'm admittedly not particularly well-qualified to discuss Deflategate, but I thought I'd weigh in with a couple of thoughts on it all the same. Hopefully I'm not inviting a heap of scorn on my head by doing so.
Based on the reports I've seen referenced in the papers, I tend to think that it looks pretty damn shady for 11 of the 12 Patriots footballs to have been discovered to be deflated during the game. Especially when one considers Belichick's past with Spygate
Last night on All In, Chris Hayes compared Belichick to Nixon in Watergate and I think there’s something to this analogy. Only insofar as the Patriots were already really well-positioned to smoke the Colts (much like Nixon was all set to destroy McGovern before the Watergate break-in). So why cheat when you don’t need to? You’re already gonna win, so why risk delegitimizing your victory like that?
At the risk of being a disloyal Buwahston spahtz fan, I will say that I think Bill Belichick is kind of an a-hole. This doesn't mean he's not a really smart coach, and it doesn't mean he cheated in this case (I don't know if he did or not – maybe some ballboy did it at the behest of Brady, maybe something else will come to light).
All it means is that it seems like Belichick is kind of an a-hole as a human being. Case in point: going for it on 4th down when you're winning by 31 points in the 4th quarter (which he did this past Sunday). That's a "twist the knife in" move if ever I saw one. It's just rubbing someone's face in it - there's no need to do such things when you're winning by 31. It's not a classy thing to do in my opinion, and Belichick doesn't help his cause by being such an arrogant AH. For his part, Brady isn’t particularly likeable either.
But with all that being said:
It does seem more than a bit over-the-top how some people are turning Deflategate into The. Scandal. of. The. Century. Especially considering how much of the Patriots offense was the running game, and also considering that Brady threw better in the 2nd half after the refs reinflated the Patriots’ footballs.
All these sanctimonious people who are oh! so outraged about the Deflategate thing, I expect they must be equally outraged about the fact that admitted spitballer Gaylord Perry is in the baseball Hall of Fame. I’m sure they write letters to the Hall of Fame demanding that Perry’s membership in the Hall be revoked immediately. I mean spitballs are illegal in baseball – it’s cheating!
(The previous paragraph comes from a person who happens to think G. Perry and spitballers of his ilk are a great and colorful part of baseball).
And if anybody reading this is thinking to themselves "There is a plethora of much more important things for us to be concerning ourselves with as a nation", you are of course right. This is incredibly minor in comparison, I know.