Don’t worry. I’m not throwing in my two cents about whether New England quarterback Tom Brady told his equipment manager to purposefully reduce the PSI in 11 of 12 footballs during last week’s AFC title game. If head coach Bill Belichick gave the order, I don’t care. This won’t affect the Super Bowl in seven days.
I am sick of this media oversaturation over Deflate-gate, as I am sure you are. We reached the point of absurdity days ago, and there unfortunately seems to be no end in sight until next week’s title showdown. The national sports media should be ashamed of themselves.
The violation at the center of this so-called controversy that “threatens the integrity of the game” essentially amounts to the sports equivalent of a traffic ticket. It really isn’t that big of a deal. New England dominated the Indianapolis Colts in order to advance to the Super Bowl, and underinflated footballs played at best a minimal part in the outcome.
Would anyone be able to notice a two-PSI difference in a football?
Brady said he couldn’t. He told the Boston media he didn’t notice anything wrong with the footballs. Sure, he also said he prefers the footballs inflated to his particular liking. Two contradictory statements — but I am willing to put more stock in the former remark simply because the Patriots really took it to the Colts in the second half, apparently after the referees caught the mistaken ball pressure and corrected it at halftime.
And yet, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard about Deflate-gate. Does this really reach the level of Pete Rose betting on baseball? Or steroid use? Or Spy-gate and Bounty-gate, for that matter? According to the national media, yes.
Every quarterback in the country, it seems, has been asked to weigh in. Sports talk shows scrambled to find “insert name here” to ask what they thought about the story, about how they like their footballs, if they could detect a difference. Even New Mexico quarterback-turned-tight-end Cole Gautsche fielded questions on a local sports talk radio show about the issue.
Deflate-gate coverage rivaled the State of the Union coverage this week. #Shrinkage, a Twitter hashtag coined by ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” show, gave President Obama’s Tuesday address to Congress a run for its money in the social media trending category (a fact that prideful co-host Mike Greenburg bragged about repeatedly).
They brought it up during NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning, a news program show about national politics. It made CNN, Fox News and other traditional news outlets.
Even my mom knows about it, and this is the woman who can’t figure out why pass interference is a penalty. Yet it’s all sports talk, or any media for that matter, has discussed since Monday.
Here’s my theory for why Deflate-gate coverage exploded: The sports media have become obsessed with finding the “bad guy.” Villains, for better or worse, provide more intriguing storylines and therefore bring more interest and more ratings.
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Take a look at the Cowboys, the Yankees and the Lakers: the three most polarizing American sports franchises. People either love them or hate them, either as a result of their continued successes, huge financial coffers to secure the best-of-the-best talent, their methods, or whatever. Their respective leagues are better when those teams are better because that polarization makes people want to watch.
LeBron James is also the perfect example. When he bolted his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers for South Beach on public television, he became the most hated sports figure in the NBA. Droves of NBA fans filled sports arenas in order to boo James. It’s a matter of having somebody to root against.
Now that LeBron has returned home to Cleveland, he’s no longer the villain. He is not as polarizing, and therefore the league lost a lot of intrigue. Conflict breeds good drama, and nothing creates conflict like a bad guy.
That makes Deflate-gate all that more frustrating. Many people already despise the New England Patriots. Belichick is abrasive and dull, Brady is a pretty boy married to a super model, the three-time Super Bowl-winning team has dominated the AFC East and is always in contention in the playoffs. And they have already been labeled as cheaters because the Spygate filming scandal in 2007. The Patriots already have that polarizing status among NFL fans.
The media does not need more fuel to that fire. For all we know, this could have been a simple oversight by the referees in their pregame checks (a possibility touched on by only a few sports talk show callers). Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill here.
Wait ... too late.
J.R. Oppenheim is the managing editor and a sports columnist for the Daily Lobo. Contact him at managingeditor@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JROppenheim.
