By Ryan Young on 5.23.08 @ 12:07AM
A Specter is haunting the NFL.
We've all heard about football's Spygate scandal by now. It has
been this offseason's dominant story. The New England Patriots
videotaped the rival New York Jets' defensive signals, in violation
of league rules. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell fined head coach
Bill Belichick a record $500,000 and stripped the Patriots of their
2008 first-round draft pick as punishment.
Spygate has stayed in the news because more evidence was
revealed by Matt Walsh, a former Patriots employee. He revealed
that the Patriots were signal-stealers for a good seven seasons.
Spygate might not be as big a deal if the offender was a losing
team. If a team cheated and still couldn't win, clearly it
couldn't have helped that much.
But this is the Patriots. They won three Super Bowls during
their seven years of signal stealing. They nearly won a fourth last
season, losing to the New York Giants. The Patriots have won more
games than any other team in football since Belichick took over in
2001.
Now the federal government is stepping in, though no one is
quite sure why. Sen. Arlen Specter, never one to shy away from the
cameras, has personally involved himself in Spygate. He thinks the
league has been dragging its feet, and wants the federal government
to launch an independent investigation.
SPECTER PUTS FORWARD a classic slippery slope argument. Like any
good political issue, it turns out that Spygate is all about the
children.
According to Specter, "If you can cheat in the NFL, you can
cheat in college, you can cheat in high school, you can cheat on
[a] grade-school math test." In other words, a sitting U.S. Senator
actually thinks that Bill Belichick might be responsible for
children cheating on their math tests.
This is not the first time that Sen. Specter, defender of
children, has wanted to tell sports leagues how to run their
businesses. In 2005, he threatened to investigate Major League
Baseball over the steroids scandal that was starting to break. MLB
Commissioner Bud Selig politely ignored Specter's grandstanding and
began his own independent investigation.
The investigation culminated in the Mitchell Report. It named 89
players who probably used steroids. It laid out some
recommendations for keeping the game steroid-free, which baseball
is starting to implement. MLB and its fans are starting to put the
Steroid Era behind them. The game is moving on.
Specter isn't. In a recent constituent newsletter he chided that
steroid-using players set "a very, very bad example." More
ominously, he wrote that "We'll be watching very closely to see
what baseball does with our oversight powers through the Judiciary
Committee."
Now Specter is on the cusp of using those oversight powers on
the NFL. Fortunately, Commissioner Goodell isn't easily
intimidated. Like Selig, he is calling the Senator's bluff. He has
decided against a Mitchell-style independent investigation. He
thinks Spygate is best handled as an internal league matter, and he
may be right about that.
What's more, Goodell stuck to his guns when he met with Sen.
Specter for a browbeating.
MAYBE SPECTER SHOULD listen to his favorite team, the Pittsburgh
Steelers, on this one. After all, they are four-time victims of
illegal Patriot cameras.
Team chairman Dan Rooney said, "We consider the tapes of our
coaching staff during our games against the New England Patriots to
be a non-issue. In our opinion, they had no impact on the results
of those games."
The best way for the NFL to handle Spygate is in a way that
satisfies the fans, not the Senate. The NFL lives and dies by fan
interest. Football is an incredibly lucrative business. Annual
revenues are over $6 billion.
If Goodell doesn't make the fans happy, or they think the game
has lost its integrity, they will stop paying attention. What that
means is that the NFL has every incentive to handle Spygate the
right way. Sen. Specter doesn't.
Not everyone is happy with how Goodell is handling Spygate, of
course. Check any sports-related message board and stand back.
But the NFL's integrity rests with the league, not with Sen.
Specter. He would do well to drop the Spygate issue and turn his
attention to more important, less telegenic concerns.
topics:
Business, Sports, NATO
