Check out this map:
This isn’t new. Way back in 2008, after the Patriots’ undefeated season ended with a Super Bowl loss to the Giants, The Onion wrote Patriots Season Perfect for Rest of Nation. It’s easy to hate an overdog.
Sports is an emotional thing. We care about teams, games and players because we care about them. And, because we care, we have inventories of sports knowledge that we enjoy enlarging through reading, watching, listening and talking to others who care about the same stuff.
Sports also holds us together. When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, there were four topics everybody talked about: the Depression, the War, sports and TV. The first two are long gone, and TV is shattering into a zillion sub-breeds of video. In fact the only breed of TV programming that still needs to be seen live, on schedule, is sports. Thus sports rules what’s left of broadcasting. It’s also what keeps newspapers alive.
When games aren’t on, about all you can do with sports is talk about it. Subjects come and go, but all are fueled by the need to talk about something, or anything. Hence the big topic of the moment: #deflationgate.
I’ll put my loyalty cards on the table: I like the New England Patriots. But I’m not hard core, or a lifer. I’ve hung out in New England for the last eight and a half years, and I’ve come to favor the teams there. But I also grew up in New Jersey, just across the river from New York, where I am right now. When I was a kid I cared a lot more about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Mets, Giants and Knicks than I do now about the Patriots or the Celtics. During my twenty years in North Carolina, I became a Duke basketball fan. (I also like Carolina, Wake, State and Virginia, in roughly that order.) When I lived in the Bay Area, for more than a decade and a half, I became a fan of the Giants, 49ers and Warriors. In fact I had season tickets to Warriors games for several years. So mostly I like sports, and that’s my main point. Can’t help it.
Yet something I care about more than any team or sport is journalism. That’s been my vocation or avocation for all my adult life, and I take its virtues seriously. I also see those virtues lacking in most coverage of #deflationgate. Sure, sports coverage is mostly about opinion, the best of which is “analysis.” But how about just some actual journalism here?
I mean, wtf are the facts? Do we actually know the ones that matter, for sure? We know some of the rules and official procedures, and that’s cool. But as for who did what, when and how, we have nothing. From Bill Belichick and Tom Brady we have denials of knowing anything about the under-inflated balls used by the Patriots in their last game, against the Colts. (Note that I don’t say “deflated,” because I’ve read or heard nothing from anybody about deflation of the balls; but we all know they had to have been inflated at some point.) Those denials, even if they prove wrong, are facts. As for the rest of the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How Much, the ratio of fact to opinion in coverage of the topic runs about one in a thousand, or worse. Who inflated and/or deflated the footballs, when, where, and how? Who inspected them — where, when and how? Perhaps by now the league knows. But the rest of us haven’t heard much more than speculation.
The most unhelpful speculations are ad hominem arguments made against the Pats, Belichick and Brady. Yes, the Belichick and the Pats were caught cheating once. That doesn’t mean they cheated this time. Matt Leinart tweets that every team tampers with their footballs. Presumably that’s an informed opinion, but it’s still just an opinion. Where’s the proof? The same question survives John Madden fingering Brady as the buck-stopper. It’s just opinion. No facts there.
But sentiment runs strong, especially against overdogs. I hated the New York Yankees when I was growing up, even though I liked Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford and other Yankees players. It’s easy to hate the Patriots, with their pretty-boy quarterback and their coach who bathes in a tub full of warm entrails. But we need facts here.
Credit where due: CBS Sports, Heavy. Got any others? Love to see ’em.
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