Does anyone else out there get the impression that Shank has been
sitting on this column for five months?
It’s a bad day for the Patriots. It’s an especially bad day for New England’s iconic quarterback, Tom Brady.
The Patriots are Super Bowl champs, but the NFL also believes the Patriots are cheaters. The Patriots certainly didn’t need to illegally deflate footballs to beat the Indianapolis Colts, 45-7, in the AFC Championship game, but according to Ted Wells’s report released Wednesday, they went ahead and did it anyway.
The reports also says it is “more probable than not” that Brady “was at least generally aware” of the tampering. Golden Boy Tom is likely to be sanctioned when the NFL doles out its punishment in the wake of the damning report issued Wednesday afternoon.
Read on, to bask in his glee at taking his best shot yet at Bill Belichick and now Tom Brady.
The Patriots won the Super Bowl fair and square, with PSI-regulation footballs. They did not need deflated footballs to beat the Colts. It certainly cannot be proven that the Patriots were doing this every week. But now they have armed their legion of enemies with a new weapon.
Which would include Dan Shaughnessy. But you knew that already.
Naturally Shank won't adequately address what the Ted Wells report says and the myriad mistakes it makes - namely that it relies entirely on ball attendant text messages and nowhere proves any rule was even flirted with, never mind broken. "More probable than not" is lawyerspeak for admission of having a view beforehand and not finding evidence for it.
ReplyDeleteIt continues to reflect Shank's ignorance of the game - the next time he chastises Belichick for using starters on PAT-block teams will be the next time he shows how ignorant he is of the game.
Shank makes it worse by defending Ted Wells, ignoring the slipshod quality of Wells' Richie Incognito report, and of course Shank doesn't want to admit that "the fanboys" have facts on their side - namely that Goodell has no knowledge of the game, that his own report's examinations disprove its conclusion, and if the investigator actually had evidence the Patriots were breaking the rules, he'd definitively say such, not use the cop-out "more probable than not" answer (an answer designed to prevent a defamation suit, not to provide an actual answer).
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