Yet Another Patriots Article

I am an avid reader of ESPN's Sports Guy, Bill Simmons. Anything that he puts up, I try to read. He's interesting; sometimes insightful; an unabashed fan of the Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics; and more often than not, right on with his opinions. However, sometimes that fan-dom can cloud his judgment. Such is the case with his latest article about the Patriots filming scandal. I think we can all agree that there's been a lot to talk about in the world of professional football lately besides what happened in week one of the NFL season with the cameraman from the Patriots being caught filming the Jets coaching staff. I think we can also agree that much has been said and written about the penalty that Commissioner Goodell handed down to the New England Patriots this past week. The penalty was given after the Patriots had video taped the New York Jets, which was in clear violation of the rule after all teams were warned by the NFL front office against doing exactly that. Everyone has been weighing in with their opinion about the harshness or leniency of those penalties. Here's what I think should have been done immediately by the office of the commissioner: absolutely nothing.

I'll explain that in a moment. First, though, I'd like to point out some things that I agree with Bill's (do you mind if I call you Bill?) article and point out some issues that I have with it.

...NBC was too determined to blow out CameraGate. Before the game, Andrea Kramer reported [Charger's Coach Norv] Turner was taking precautions from a secrecy standpoint, refusing to allow any Patriots personnel into his locker room and even handing his players the first 15 plays Sunday morning instead of Saturday night...Kramer was treating the topic so seriously and breathlessly, you would have thought she was standing in Iraq with missiles going off behind her.

Completely agree. This has been a problem with how network TV handles sports for quite some time. They decide on one or two "story-lines" to follow throughout the game and they just...can't...let...go. This is one of the reasons why John Madden and every other announcer doing a Packers' game spend so much time gushing over Brett Favre. Even if he's having a horrible game, all we can hear about is how he's "having fun out there" and is "a gunslinger." There doesn't seem to be the talent or the producers willing to let the game dictate the line of conversation in the booth. It almost seems like they have a script to read before going on the air. But that couldn't happen, could it?

Look, I know everyone now assumes the Patriots have been cheating for the past six years, even though they hadn't been penalized even once before last weekend; even though no coach or player has left New England since 2002 and blown the whistle on them; and even though the New England players were fired up Sunday night, partly because everyone has been so eager to stick an asterisk next to everything that's happened from 2001-2007.

I agree that there's a bit of a gleam in the eyes of the media and some of the sports-loving public because of the "how the mighty have fallen" syndrome. It's much the same reason why many people enjoy to watch the Yankees, Lakers, and Cowboys struggle. We enjoy success stories in America. We just don't like to see one person/team/group dominate for too long. Success is all well and good, but we like to see fresh faces at the top of the mountain, too. It's just human nature.

Our "evidence" that there may have been a prolonged pattern of cheating last week came from "unnamed sources" and players who had already lost big games to the Patriots and seemed excited to have an excuse after all these years...If this pattern of inappropriate behavior had been happening for six years, wouldn't they have been caught before Sept. 9, 2007?

Um...Bill? They were. In fact, I direct you to your employer's website to read an article almost completely contradicting your statements.

"It's not their first time," a member of the [NFL's competition] committee, who did not wish to be identified, said.

Granted, it's an "unnamed" source, but it's an unnamed source that has to be a team executive or coach, since that is who is on the committee. From the same article (emphasis mine):

Green Bay Packers president Bob Harlan confirmed a similar incident that occurred when the Patriots played at Lambeau Field last Nov. 19. The same cameraman who was questioned by NFL security on Sunday was also the one whom the Packers removed from the sideline and escorted from the field during their 2006 game, according to Packers security official Doug Collins. "From what I can remember, he had quite a fit when we took him out," Harlan said. "We had gotten word before the game that they [the Patriots] did this sort of thing, so we were looking for it."

Hardly an unnamed source with this incident. None of this matters, though. They were caught after the entire league had been specifically warned against employing any sort of recording device in the stadium.

Simmons again:

They got caught, they paid the price. Like every other Pats fan, I hate what happened and continue to be disappointed that our coach pulled a Nixon on us. I don't know how many times I can write this. They are the villains of the NFL. The Belichick era has been tainted.

On to the punishment. Why do I think that Goodell should not have given out any public punishment when so many have been screaming that the punishment should have been more harsh, including adding a suspension of Belichick? Simple: because it's Belichick. The problem with the punishment as it currently stands - $500,000 fine for Belichick, $250,000 fine for the Patriots, loss of a first round pick if they make the playoffs, a second and a third if they don't - is that there is no immediate impact on the season in which the problem occurred. In fact, I find it interesting that all of this happened in a season that some had regarded as Belichick's swan song in New England. I wonder if the extension that he just signed was, to a certain extent, the owner of the Patriots saying, "Clean up your own mess" since the loss of draft picks is normally so crippling for a franchise. See also: The Minnesota Timberwolves and Smith, Joe. However, look deeper. If they lose the first-round draft pick, which most people expect since they should be in the playoffs, they have another one due to a trade with the San Francisco 49ers, which is likely to be higher in the round than their own pick anyway. Is it a loss? Sure, but not one from which the team can't recover. In fact, what all this melodrama surrounding the Patriots has effectively done is provide the team with the dreaded "us against them" motivator. Do you think Belichick isn't going to take advantage of that? Look at the way they effectively dismantled a very talented (but poorly-led) Chargers team. Don't you suppose that Belichick went into the locker room before the game and talked about how the world wanted to see them crumble and fall under the weight of the current scrutiny? He's a master of the us against them mentality. Of course he used it.

Here's how I think it should have been handled. Goodell should not have announced any draft pick removal, fines, suspensions or anything until after the season was over. During the season, he would bring up how fantastic an organization the Patriots are. They've won three Super Bowls this decade. They're the modern dynasty. They're never strapped for salary cap, talent, or intelligence. In fact, he should bring up positive notes about the Patriots even when they're not involved in the line of questioning. "Yes, what Terrell Owens said was a bit over the top. There may be some fines coming for him in the near future. I wish he could be more like Randy Moss has been since he's gone to the Patriots. Moss has been the perfect citizen in New England. I suppose it's being under the influence of such a classy organization from top to bottom. I wish all of our teams could be coached and run more like New England."

Would these sort of talking points hurt the commissioner's hard-line image? Of course. At least, until he handed out the penalties at the end of the year. But it would eat Belichick that he has such a prominent and vocal proponent in Goodell. It would make it that much harder to pull the world is against us bit. Might it cause them some wins? Maybe, maybe not, but it'd be fun to watch if you were in on the "punishment."

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They Grow Up So Quickly

My daughter, Punkin, took another step in her journey towards becoming a young woman. It, of course, brought back memories of changing her diaper, late-night feedings, running full-bore down the hallway when she should be asleep. Ah, the memories. This is normally where a sentimental musical number would be placed. Pretty soon she'll be moving out of the house and finding a husband. The continuing journey was evident today once again. My daughter played Super Mario Bros.

While visiting Anne's folks, her mom mentioned that Punkin, now five, was getting to be a little too big for the baby toys that she had in the bedroom for the kids to play with. She made the suggestion that we should maybe break out the old Super Nintendo and see if she'd like to do that. I was all for it. After all, I really enjoy video games and quite often long for the simpler days where the controllers don't have 20 different buttons. They make me feel old and ineffectual. Super Nintendo may not be as simple as the original Nintendo that I had growing up, but it's simple enough for me. Besides which, I was able to get quite a bit of Super Nintendo time in at friends' homes when I was growing up. Then we fired it up.

It's amazing to me how quickly a little girl who has never before in her life played an actual video game system. Sure, she has this little pocket pet sort of toy that lets her care for a rabbit and play some games with it, but that's it. Once she got the hang of moving the little guy on the screen and jumping, it wasn't too long before she was able to get through one of the first levels all by herself. I cried a little bit.

She has a long way to go, of course. She still hasn't gotten the hang of the cape or being a fire guy. That will come in time, I'm sure. She just has to practice a little bit more.

The biggest surprise to me was that Anne agreed to it. Excuse me now, while I perform the sentimental musical number that I mentioned earlier.

"Is this the little girl I carried?"

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The Long Wait

I hate waiting for things. I hate waiting for a pregnancy test to be ready to read. I hate waiting in lines. I hate waiting for Christmas to be here. Most of all, I hate waiting for something to arrive. Whether it was company coming over when I was a kid, or simply for the mailman, it's always gotten on my nerves to wait for that arrival. This is amplified when I'm having to wait for a new toy. Such has been the case for the past few weeks while waiting for my laptop to arrive. Yes, that's right, I finally purchased one.

Those who know me well will recall the fact that in my ideal case, I would now be typing on a MacBook Pro. There's just one slight problem with that original plan: they're really expensive. The $1700 for a refurbished MacBook would have taken me another year or so to save up the necessary funds. For a while, I was content to wait, but then circumstances conspired against me. You see, for a few months, we had the laptop belonging to Anne's brother here while I was configuring it for their use as missionaries in Mexico. We quickly found that laptops are addictive. They're so nice and convenient. We didn't have to run all the way into the basement (a short trip, sure, but with small children in the house, you can't make a trip quickly enough) to check our email, the score of the Twins' game (usually not good), or see what the weather is like outside (because opening a window is too hard). You can imagine the withdrawal that we experienced when we finally had to send the laptop to the rightful owners to be used as it was originally intended. Now I could no longer sit on the couch and write my snarky comments. Anne couldn't email me several times a day (I really missed that). This called for drastic measures. This called for my giving up being so stubborn.

One could ask at this point, "Why didn't you go for the cheaper option of the MacBook?" Excellent question. I'm glad that I had you ask that in our pretend conversation. There's a couple of reasons that I didn't want to go for the MacBook. First, I'm not all that crazy about how small the screen was. Sure, it's really small and cute and portable, but would I get tired of looking at such a small screen? Secondly, it bothered me that they used two sticks of RAM to get up to one gigabyte. This might seem like a small thing, but when I knew that I'd want to be upgrading it to two gigs, it became more expensive to upgrade that way. Finally, and this is big for me, was the fact that it was using the integrated graphics card. I know that the integrated graphics have gotten better than they were in previous incarnations, but there's still something in me that's bothered by having such an important component of how the system performs being essentially an after-thought add-in to the motherboard. Give me something I can sink my teeth into that starts by letting me know how big the RAM is on my video card. Don't make me use the RAM that the rest of the system is trying to use. That just doesn't make anyone happy. So, I couldn't go MacBook.

Then I started to research. Price was a big consideration, but I also didn't want something that would be completely obsolete in two months. It could be a little bit obsolete, but I drew the line at completely obsolete. A guy's gotta have standards, after all. I found that Gateway was a bit over-priced. I'd heard too many friends that had troubles with Toshiba. Sony is pretty, but a bit on the pricey side. Then I looked at Dell.
The company for which I work has a deal with Dell. You can either get a certain percentage off normal catalog pricing, or you can customize one of the "company standards" to your liking at a pretty substantial savings. That's the route that I went. Oh, sure, I couldn't get my laptop in Arctic Blue (<sarcasm>Oh, no. Whatever will I do without my laptop being a "custom" color</sarcasm>) and I also couldn't get Windows Vista on the machine, which might not be a bad thing from some of the stuff I've been hearing about Vista. However, I was able to get a Core 2 processor on it, one gig of RAM (single stick), a 128 MB Nvidia graphics card (for all the heavy Diablo 2 playing), and, all-in-all, a very nice machine.

I'm going to call it Junior.

The problem was, however, I had to wait for it. When I ordered it, I got a ship date that was three weeks after the time of placing the purchase. Needless to say, it was a long time to wait for me. I started religiously checking the order status page that Dell provides because, obviously, they have too much bandwidth and need to burn some off. I mean, I was pining the thing every few minutes at one point. Then, finally, it ticked over to "shipped." I raised my hands in triumph. Then I looked at the calendar and saw that it was shipping via 3-5 day ground and we had a long weekend ahead of us. There was no way that I thought it would be here before Tuesday of next week. I was downtrodden again. But I wasn't done with surprises just yet. It seems that DHL is able to get a package from Nashville, TN to my door in just over 24 hours. Anne called me at work around nine to let me know that it had arrived. That made for a really long day of work, let me tell you. Finally, though, I was home and could open the package. Well, after the kids were down for bed at least. Now, for the past three plus hours, I've been working on getting everything installed (FireFox, Pidgin, Hamachi).

Now, if only I could figure out why it's making so much noise each time it's accessing the hard drive. I wonder if I should be worried.

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