MattM

So, who are you going to root for when the Pats* start to suck again and you're hopping off that bandwagon? I'm guessing you'll go back to being a Cowpokes fan myself......

Check the NYT article I linked to numerous posts above, for ex. The Steelers-Pats game was the 2004 season AFC Championship game.....

Welcome to the Board, Pats fan. I say "Pats fan" since you joined yesterday and have a seemingly well-researched/rehearsed line on why it was all no big deal. Although from some of the posts above perhaps you work for the League! On your arguments re: money, wouldn't it make even more economic sense for the owners to downplay any threat to the integrity of the game so as to save "the franchise" (ie., the League)? Once folks start understanding that it's more like the WWF than a major sport, you risk destroying the entire League. None of the owners wants to remotely go there. As you can see above, rightly or wrongly, not many here are likely to be buying what you're selling. I, like others here, suspect that New England did more cheating than just Spygate, but that's just me/us. I won't go rehash all the aruments above, but while we're on the topic of Steelers-Pats games, I seem to recall one playoff game between the two several years ago when the Steelers had about a 70 yard run nullified on a phantom holding call--par for the course for the Pats, so you probably don't remember it, but rest assured that others who follow the League do......

Tim, if you're still reading, what say you to an article on fans of other teams' perception of the Pats and Spygate, etc. a year later? For ex., giving some of the folks here who think they cheated more than has been let on a voice in the mainstream media. I suspect (in fact, I know, since I did it myself last year) that if you poll fans of other teams you'll find that the folks here writing in this thread are not the only ones who smell something rotten in Denmark when it comes to Spygate and New England more generally. I'd be curious whether ESPN (and the League) would take kindly to opening that back up, or whether that's something they just want the lid to stay on as tightly as possible.....

The player was Ross Tucker of SI.com, who's quickly becoming one of my favorite NFL writers (along with NFL Post and its crew) (no offense, Tim)......

What about Martz and Warner--I seem to recall the two of them coming down pretty hard on the Pats over this, or have they all kissed and made up?

Tim, while I know we've had this discussion before, there were other unsubstantiated allegations (and admittedly those may be the key words here) against the Pats, as detailed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/sports/f...ttee&st=cse And elsewhere. The part of this article that I like is the fact that the reporter got other NFL folks to say that the impression was that the Pats were guilty of "living on the edge" (or over it) more than anyone else: "They were the only team, really,” the executive said. “Clearly, they were the team mentioned far more than anybody else.” I recall seeing similar articles on SI.com around the combine that year (King or Z)--people who told them behind closed doors and without attribution for fear of retribution that they thought the Pats were cheaters basically and that they were actually pretty angry about it. Again, you may make something of the fact that folks chose not to speak out publicly, but they may have a legit fear of retribution in the case of a League like the NFL that seemed to want to get everyone in lockstep on an issue affecting the League's perceived integrity. In addition, I also wonder if you ever saw the HBO special on Matt Walsh. In that one they directly quote an unnamed "offensive star" (HBO's words) on those early Pats teams who said, "of course it helped immensely--we knew what was coming". How do you discount that? I watched it three times to make sure that they were directly quoting an actual player and that is what it certainly sounded like to me. To this day, I can't believe that more was not made of that fact and the substance of this player's quote.....

Plus one, Lori--I agree completely. It pains me to admit that I rooted heartily for that first Pats* team. If only I'd known what was to come.....

I was at that game and we all thought Bruce might have literally killed him. Boomer's problem was that he had a rookie LT pressed into duty a bit early who didn't get the snap count on that play right and just stood there while Bruce went after Esiason like Bruce was shot out of a cannon. As Dennis Hopper would say, "Bad things, man, bad things"--those were the days, boy.....

I agree, but based on past officiating history in our contests with them I strongly suspect that our definition of "clean" (or that of any reasonable person) will not line up with the officials' definition of "clean" when it comes to Brady on game night. If we are even close to hitting him late it will be 15 and possibly an ejection/suspension/banishment/disembowelment......

And you know the terms of that contract extension he signed? Is it guaranteed, unlike player salaries?

Unfortunately, this sounds like the most likely scenario to me, too.....

RIP--what horrible news.....

90% of the people who post here often could have written an article three times as good as this one about the Bills. Does that site just post open submissions?

From what I understand about HGH, it mainly just makes recovery time quicker in terms of muscle fatigue, which apparently mainly helps older players (a la Rodney "HGH" Harrison)--is there a muscle building benefit to it as well? What other kind of PED's are you talking about--are there others that aren't tested for as well? You may be right, but I'd hate to think that 75% of the League is on something they shouldn't be on--football would be no better than baseball if that's correct.....

I hate to say it, but maybe that's how he came out of relatively nowhere a couple of years ago. Might be mighty tempting to someone on the margins (either of just making the League or, slightly up the food chain, of starting) to start using. Ross Tucker wrote a good column on that temptation a ways back on SI.com. I don't know if I'd call this good news, however, in that even though it takes out an opponent's key player, it's almost like rooting for an injury, which isn't too cool and gives bad karma besides.....

That's good to hear--too often it's mainly the negative stories that you see, a la Vick and Stallworth, these days. My wife and I got to meet Eric Wood at a Bills Backers event in NYC last month and I agree that he seemed like a good guy, very earnest and seemed to be very glad to be both in the League and playing for the Bills. Let's hope he and Levitre both have long and productive careers in the Red, White and Blue!

Congrats! I did the same thing with my kids when they were born--their hospital pictures are of them wearing a little Bills cap (a bit unusual in Connecticut!)

Here are some public company comparables, as they say in the biz, for pulp and paper companies: Abitibibowater--went into bankruptcy in April http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...id=aRwUKRRNEkI4 Weyerhauser--Lost over 60% of its value in the last two years: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=WY#char...ource=undefined Kraft's company is private, so it doesn't need to publicly publish its results, but I'd take an educated guess that they're not doing too much (if any) better than their brethren. If you go onto their website, you'll see that the other parts of their business being touted are "real estate" and "private equity", neither of which is exactly burning it up right now, either. I point this out since some Pats* fans seem to think that Kraft if just made of money and the Pats* will be one of the teams that dominate if the League goes uncapped. I'd have thought that myself 12-18 months ago, but now I'm not so sure. While it's obvious that many businesses are worth significantly less than they were a year ago, pulp, paper, real estate (especially commercial) and PE are all leading laggards as you might say, faring even more poorly than the average businesses it appears.....

Yeah, it does actually. What they all did was downplay the seriousness of the offense "for the good of the League", which doesn't mean that they all approved of what the Pats* and Belicheat did, of course. Remember, they are all owners of the "NFL Franchise" and any tarnishing of the franchise hurts all of them in the pocketbook. If it were to come out that one of the most successful teams in the League had been cheating for years, wouldn't that undermine the legitimacy of the entire League and turn off fans? To turn one back on you, how else do you explain things like the NFL initially implying that the cheating was a recent development when announcing the punishment in the fall (and after they'd destroyed what they thought was all the evidence), but only when faced with additional evidence in the form of Walsh that February admitted that it had gone back several years? What they tried to do, and were largely successful at doing, was sweep all of this under the rug and try to get back to business as usual before the fans realized how deep the cheating went. On the CBA, what I personally suspect is that certain owners really didn't want a salary cap and thought that this option might be a way to get rid of it. I also suspect that some of those same owners (read Kraft and Jones, among others) may be rethinking that in light of the current economic situation, which has shown that sports don't have the pricing power with fans that they based a lot of their projections on. They're watching an empty Yankee Stadium with horror, no doubt, and are also following the Jets and Giants difficulties with PSLs, both in the richest city in the country (albeit one where the financial sector is very large.) When you're levered 3 or 4 to one (and that's a conservative estimate) on some of these stadium (like "Jerry Jones" stadium) and real estate deals (like Patriot* Place) and your cost of funding goes up 2-3 % (again, being conservative, considering how much spreads have blown out in the last two years) from your projections, that can really hurt. Some simple math here--for a billion dollar stadium at 4-1, that's $800 million--paying 2% more for that money means you've got $16 million less per year than your original projections. That's a big chunk of change for teams that have net income of $30-40 million in total (and those are the high earners in the League if they're to be believed, like the 'Pokes at $30 million and the Pats* at $40m). Good thing the Pats* have the highest ticket prices in the League to service that debt, since I thought I'd read that neither they nor the 'Pokes have secured long-term financing on those palaces, meaning they're subject to the debt markets' vagaries described above. Wonder how Krafts' other business is doing? Paper must be a really lucrative business in the new media age, right?

Many thanks, Lori. Wasn't Peters replaced at LT in some of those early games by Walker or Chambers, however? I could have sworn that Walker played a good bit of LT early in the year, but maybe I'm getting myself confused with the prior year when Chambers/Walker covered for Peters when he was hurt at year end.

Peters has talent--I don't think there's a question of that. He just didn't seem to play that well last year, probably in large part due to his lack of TC and conditioning issues early in the year. I also thought that he really didn't play (or at least start) in the first two or three games of the year--i.e., the wins against Oakland and Jacksonville, for ex.--but could be wrong about that. Anyone have that info handy? To me, if he didn't play in those games (i.e., wins, albeit against weaker opponents) that also bolsters the argument that he wasn't as vital a cog as some national media folks think.....

Actually, there were a number of stories during Spygate that stated or implied that players and coaches at least were pretty much told to say nothing negative about Spygate in terms of what they really felt. One I recall in particular was written by someone on SI.com (either King or Z) at the combine that year and was quoting folks in attendance (mainly coaches, but some players) anonymously and "off the record" for that reason and guess what, those folks were ripschitt mad at Belicheat and the Pats*, but were pretty much told to gag it officially. Folks closing ranks for their overall long-term mutual benefit happens all the time, even when some individuals in the group find it very distasteful to do so. Why do you find that so hard to believe, especially when applied to the NFL, which is run notoriously well (read disciplined) among sports leagues. Why, just look at the united front the owners are putting up in their dealings over the CBA recently, for example. I'm sure that there are differing opinions there (must be, since some, like your owner were among the architects of the original deal they're now trying to break--funny how "business geniuses" like Kraft and Jones seem to get let off the hook for that one, yet guys like Wilson and Brown who voted against it were so chastised as dottering old fools at the time), but we don't really see them, least of all in the press.

Likely written by someone who has about 1/12th the knowledge of the Bills that the avg poster here has. It's amazing that some of these folks have jobs in sports journalism......

From me as well--good article.