The Trifecta

Major League Baseball has steroids. Track and field has steroids. For the love of god, professional cycling even has steroids. And the NFL, the only sport actually filled with massive men who everyone assumed was, or should have been juicing, what do they have? A video camera. That’s right, we’re talking Spygate here. What is Spygate you may ask? In 2007 the New England Patriots were found to be filming the defensive signals of the opposing New York Jets. Bill Belichick was fined a league maximum $500,000 and the team was stripped of their first round draft pick in 2008, although they were allowed to keep the seventh overall pick they received from the 49ers. To be fair, the punishment doesn’t exactly fit the crime. What is $500,000 to Belichick, and stripping a team of the second to last pick in the first round of the draft amounts to a slap on the wrist.

Now, just this past week, the NFL held a vote on whether to allow defensive captains to have a headset in their helmet, much like the quarterbacks have had for years. The measure passed easily. My question is, what the hell took so long? And why wasn’t this talked about earlier? All year every football pundit in the world argued either how awful the Patriots were, or that everyone does it and they were simply the first ones to get caught. However, no one brought up the fact that the solution was already in place on the other side of the ball! Why were they still relying on a coach flapping his arms and tipping his hat and then touching his nose to call in plays from the sideline? I understand the league had to wait until the end of the year to implement a new policy, but they should have at least talked about it so fans knew that it was on their radar.

-Ritt