Tag Archives: Bill Belichick

Sports news

Heavens no! Don’t waive waiting period for Brady, Belichick

An essayist for NBC.com has gone off the rails. He needs to obtain a reality check.

Mike Florio has opined that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and his head coach Bill Belichick deserve to be inducted immediately into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after their retirement from the game.

Stop! Get real! Do not go there, National Football League gurus!

The NFL places a five-year waiting period on those who retire from the game before inducting them into the hall of fame. Why? They don’t want them coming back to the game after their induction. It works well for the NFL, just as it works for Major League Baseball.

There should be only one reason to waive the five-year wait for induction: the death of a shoo-in inductee.

Major League Baseball waived the waiting period in 1973 for the great Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente, who was killed in a plane crash in December 1972 while transporting relief supplies to Nicaragua, which had suffered a terrible earthquake.

Clemente was a sure-fire bet to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. His death meant he wouldn’t be coming back. That’s when a friend and former colleague of mine, the late Joe Heiling, stepped in. Heiling — with whom I worked at the Beaumont Enterprise — was a baseball beat writer for the Houston Post when Clemente died; he was serving as president of the Baseball Writers of America, which votes on the Hall of Fame induction. Heiling proposed that the BBWA waive the rule and include Clemente immediately on the next Hall of Fame ballot. The BBWA agreed, Clemente’s name was added and he was elected overwhelmingly into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Do we waive the five-year rule for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick? No! As long they still draw breath on this good Earth, they need to wait their turn.

Read Florio’s piece here.

Sports news

Deflate-gate non-story re-emerges

Count me as someone who believes the New England Patriots’ “deflate-gate” story is, well, a non-story.

You also can count me as someone who doesn’t believe all-world quarterback Tom Brady should face any serious punishment for what he might have known about the balls that were deflated prior to the Patriots’ blowout win over the Indianapolis Colts in last year’s AFC championship football game.

http://espn.go.com/boston/nfl/story/_/id/12839315/tom-brady-agent-says-wells-report-significant-terrible-disappointment

The NFL lawyer who looked into this mess has determined that head coach Bill Belichick didn’t know anything about the balls. Nor did team owner Robert Kraft.

Brady, on the other hand, “probably” knew that some hanky-panky was going on with the balls, that someone was letting some of the air out of them to make them easier to catch and handle.

Probably knew?

That’s proof of anything? Hardly.

The only way this matter becomes relevant to anything is if the Patriots had won the game on a last-second hail Mary pass that Brady would have thrown to a receiver who couldn’t have held on to a properly inflated football.

That didn’t happen. The Patriots blew the Colts away. As someone once wrote, the Patriots would have won playing with beach balls.

I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of whether Brady should be suspended or fined or both.

Whatever happened to those footballs prior to the AFC championship game had no bearing on the outcome.

There. End of story? Oh, probably not.

Sports news

Let's change the subject; enough 'Deflate-gate'

Will someone out there please put a cork on this football inflating matter?

Please, pretty please?

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick held a press conference today. A young friend of mine here in Amarillo — a dedicated Pats fan — said he thinks the coach “put an end to it today” with his presser.

Man, I hope so.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/bill-belichick-is-angry-he-spent-a-week-studying-balls/ar-AA8xVva

Belichick says the Patriots followed “every rule” with regard to the footballs, which have become the subject of ongoing controversy and commentary — yes, including here. Someone ratted out the Patriots after they smashed the Indy Colts in the AFC championship game, saying the balls were under-inflated, which reportedly made them easier to catch in the cold, rainy weather in Foxboro, Mass.

Whatever.

The story is growing more legs than a centipede. I’m waiting now for the conspiracy theories to start hatching. Bet on it, once they do and they start getting lives of their own, this story will never die. Ever.

My solution is a simple one. The National Football League should take responsibility for inflating the balls. Inflate them identically. Pay no attention whatever the quarterback wants. Tell each QB, “Here’s the ball, buster. Take it or leave it.” Give each team their allotment of footballs as they are taking the field for their pre-game drills. And do not let anyone other than the players — and officials, of course — touch ’em before, during or after the game.

Now, let’s get ready to play the Super Bowl.

 

Sports news

Media love "Deflate-gate"

Howard Kurtz, savvy media critique that he is, has posited the theory that the media are hyping up the “scandal” involving deflated footballs and whether the New England Patriots cheated their way into the Super Bowl because, well, it’s good for ratings.

Writing on FoxNews.com, Kurtz wonders precisely why the media have become fixated with this story. The Patriots, after all, clobbered the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC championship game this past weekend. The notion that they purposely deflated footballs to make them more catchable had zero bearing on the outcome of the game, according to Kurtz.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/23/deflate-gate-why-media-are-overinflating-football-flap/?cmpid=cmty_twitter_fn

The media might start concocting conspiracy theories any moment now and might start ascribing all kinds of evil intent on the Patriots.

Kurtz has one idea on what might be driving this media interest. He writes: “Much of the sports media can’t stand Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach. He openly treats reporters with disdain. He’s become a symbol, fairly or unfairly, of sports arrogance and immorality.”

What’s more, as Kurtz says: “At his presser yesterday, Belichick looked nervous, defensive, ticked off to be there, as if he were undergoing a root canal. When he got done with a halting monologue denying any knowledge of ball tampering, he gave one-sentence answers to a few questions and cut it off.

“Every good scandal story needs a villain, and Belichick is it — especially because he was fined $500,000 in the 2007 Spygate incident, where the Pats secretly videotaped the Jets’ defensive coaches’ signals.”

In the grand scheme of serious public policy issues, this one ranks — oh, I don’t know — perhaps nowhere.

But it does involve entertainment celebrities, aka known as highly compensated professional football players.

It’s all too bad. My fear now is that with the Super Bowl now barely more than a week away and with all the pregame hyped planned prior to the game, the media are going to overlook what could be an exciting sporting event between two talented football teams.

Instead, they’ll seek to solve the mystery of, “Who in the hell deflated those footballs?”