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ShareThisThe Patriots: J.A.D.
Until now, I had been quite proud of the fact that this blog was one of the very few --- possibly the only --- Spygate-discussion-free football website in existence. Unless I've forgotten about something, not one word about the topic has been written here. And this really isn't a Spygate post either. It's more of a meta-Spygate post. But in order to set it up, I have to say just a few words about Spygate itself.
I think the Patriots knowingly broke rules with the intent of gaining a competitive advantage. I think the competitive advantage they gained was probably somewhere between negligible and very small, somewhere on the order of one or two expected wins during the course of the Belichick era. I think it's possible that other teams are as guilty as, or even more guilty than, the Patriots, but that New England is probably in the top five or top ten cheatingest teams of the last decade. I have very little basis for any of these beliefs.
But as I said, this post isn't about Spygate. It's about the reaction to Spygate. It's about what morality means in team sports. It's about double standards. It's about win-at-all-costs being an admirable motto and a disgraceful one, depending on how the costs are counted.
Matt Walsh had nothing. But his eight tapes' worth of nothing ignited another round of columns about how evil the Patriots were. Walsh's and Ross Tucker's allegations that the Patriots misused the injured reserve list to their advantage would have been No Big Deal had it been any other team. But it was (is?) a Big Deal because it was the Patriots. Why? The easy answer is jealousy, and that's part of it.
But far more important is the way the Patriots have portrayed themselves, and have been portrayed by their supporters, since February of 2002: as not just a great team, but a team that was great because of its morality.
In team sports, the ultimate Moral Good is devotion to the team above self. Just behind that is the will to win, and for some reason intelligence is considered a moral virtue as well. These were the cornerstones of the Patriots' schtick. The Pats didn't win because they have more talent; they won because they play better as a team. They didn't win because they had better athletes, they won because they were smarter and harder-working and more willing to make personal sacrifices for the good of the team. They wanted it more.
When a team goes out of its way to break from the norm and introduce itself as a team --- and when its fans fall all over themselves praising this choice --- there is a clear implication of moral superiority. The Rams could have won that Super Bowl if they had had the courage to put the good of the team above their own personal glory. The Patriots didn't just win. They won The Right Way. They won only because they did things The Right Way. And that's what Pats' fans have been emphasizing for the last five years.
And I don't blame them for emphasizing that. Winning The Right Way is something to be proud of. It is better than just winning. But the problem is: if you want credit for winning The Right Way, you have to, you know, actually win the right way.
That's why "they didn't really gain a competitive advantage" and "other teams have admitted to similar violations" fall on deaf ears that surround an angry face. If you've been lecturing me for five years on how you win because of your ability to do the little things right, I don't want to hear that this was just a little cheating. If the secret of your success is having the strength of character to do what other teams aren't willing to do, I'm going to react badly when you tell me that sure, you cheated, but no more than anyone else probably. And I'm not going to find it too much of a stretch to believe that maybe the other secret to your success is that you had the weakness of character to do what other teams weren't willing to do.
The Patriots are taking more heat about this than other teams would for the same reason that a televangelist takes more heat than a rock star when he turns out to be a drug-using adulterer.
Has the Patriots' dynasty been tarnished? Yes and no.
No. Their on-field accomplishments stand, as far as I'm concerned. It probably was a very small competitive advantage (if any) and other teams probably were cheating at nearly a similar level. The New England Patriots are the legitimate dynasty of this decade. But eight months ago, they were more than that. They were some sort of transcendent super-dynasty. That hasn't merely been tarnished. It has disintegrated.
The Patriots: Just Another Dynasty.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
I think this is a measured and thoughtful post on the topic. I'd like to congratulate you on it before the comment thread invariably goes to hell.
I haven't paid much attention to the spygate debate, but Doug, you've seem to hit the nail on the head.
I believe you are saying that the Pats fans were jeterating* their team. Ah, the inter-sport irony. Plus I just like to plug the JoeBlog.
*You can look it up at:
http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2008/05/23/please-i-wanna-like-derek-jeter-i-do/
Amen!
On a vaguely related note, it drives me nuts that every scandal has the word "gate" tacked onto the end of it. But in this case, I found it amusing. Nixon had people break into the DNC headquarters even though he was going to win the election easily, which starts the landslide. Instead of being remembered for his tremendous foreign policy work, he's remembered for cheating.
The Patriots engaged in completely unnecessary petty cheating even though they're a dominant team and the cheating probably had no significant effect on their games. So now instead of being the hands-down best team in the history of football, they're the best team who got caught cheating.
I like the post Doug but I never really got the feeling the Pats thought there were morally superior because they won the way they did. What evidence is there for that? I mean did they really present themselves that way or is that just everyone else saying it?
Belichick has always been this kind of weird combination of genius and hard-nosed crumudgeon. Yes, Bill Simmons likes to say the Patriots do The Little Things.
But I didn't see that much of what you're saying. Brady is an excellent skill player. So are their offensive linemen, etc.
I always took their hallmark as coaching. Belichick could take average guys and plug them into a system. He could game plan. You can attach a lot of different narratives to that, but I don't think yours is the only one or even the top one.
I think people are reacting strongly not because the Pats are/were morally superior. People are reacting because they've won so much and now they're drifting towards Barry Bonds, track athletes and others who have cheated.
Wow, as a Patriots fan I would like to say thank you for your level headed and rational criticism. Everything you said is right on the money. In all the yelling and screaming Patriots fans have dealt with since the scandal broke, no one has been as on the money about what the issues were: Jealousy and Loss of the Moral High ground. And you took them down the right amount. No burning at the stake, just rank them behind the 90's Cowboys as "Just Barely a Dynasty" and let that be that.
So that being said, who's job do you want? Bob Ryan's or Dan Shaughnessy's at the Boston Globe, or Mike Tomase's or Tony Massarotti at the Boston Herald? Because even the local "journalists" have jumped ship on this one.
"So now instead of being the hands-down best team in the history of football, they’re the best team who got caught cheating."
I really don't think they would have been the "hands-down" best team in history. Surely they would have been a consideration for best-ever (and still are), but never "hands-down".
I suppose there's never a "hands-down" best team.
I just want Spygate to be brought up no more and no less than the 70s Steelers taking steroids, Michael Irvin pushing off, or Denver cheating the salary cap. I'm ok with it being brought up more often than that story about Jimmy Johnson(?) having a flunky go through the Bills' trashcan.
Very well stated Doug. I agree with you 100% about the amount of "competitive advantage" that the Pats got. I think we can call them the BEST TEAM EVER IN THE REGULAR SEASON, but they lost the "super-dynasty" label the second after the Super Bowl game ended. No other Team ever won as many as 16 games in the Reg. season, but others have won as many as 18 for the whole year, and more importantly, they WON the last game played-which always turns out to be the MOST IMPORTANT game of the year.
Disclaimer: not a Patriot fan. Texans, as it happens. And English, to boot, so not given to reading a lot of mainstream US fishwrap or watching Jim Rome.
I think the key paragraph in this article is the third. If we are to laud desire to win and intelligence so highly, can we be surprised that a coach and team we admire for these attributes should cheat assiduously and persistently? What is discarding one's sense of honour and fair play to improve one's team's chances of victory, if not devotion to the team above self?
Perhaps there is a rule that comes in above all of these in our determination of sporting moral virtue: don't cheat. All the other rules would then feature "within the bounds of rule one" disclaimers. I know I hate soccer players diving and feigning injury more than any other sight in sports. And yet I don't hate the Patriots, and feel no emotion about Spygate whatsoever. Perhaps because I feel that they violated technical minutiae, not integral rules. League rules, not fundamental rules on the sport. Would anyone really give a stuff if the league legalised the taping of defensive signals? Would a league in which such practices were not banned cease to be an American Football league? Then again, maybe it's because on-pitch cheating feels like a bigger deal than off.
Apologies if the above is a bit rambling. It's 1.30am and I may not be entirely sober.
What everyone is so blind to is what the rule actually says - it bans IN-GAME USE OF TAPE, NOT TAPING PER SE. As The Sports Law Professor blogsite points out, what the Patriots did DID NOT break the rule in question; Belichick's interpretation of the rule was a legitimatge one. The key to the issue was that the Roger Goodell memo issued just before the first Jets game MISSTATED THE RULE, and Goodell has continued on this issue with serial arrogance, ineptitude, and a complete lack of street smarts - after meeting with Matt Walsh he tacitly acknowledged the Patriots' taping practices were not illegal when he somewhat flippantly noted that other teams wanted to tape but decided not enough good would come of it for them.
Where the Patriots have portrayed themselves as great in a different sense from other teams is that they have indeed worked a lot harder to weed out bad characters from their squads; also they were the first team to win the Superbowl by NOT going over the salary cap; their cap management changed how teams work to build championship squads.
The Patriots did indeed win the right way and continue to do so.