Self-righteous pundits love anything with a "-gate" at the end

Think he'd give this up for a little reputation repair? Nope.

With all of this Bill Belichick business finally starting to settle down, most of the national pundits are finishing up their self-righteous rants about cheating and dishonesty.

As you've seen with many controversial subjects on this blog, my stance is usually a bit divergent from the media consensus about incidents.

When someone commits a wrong in sports, national columnists and pundits across the country can't jump to their keyboards fast enough to denounce the evil doer. If there is a juicy story out there, you can bet that anyone with a platform will try and one-up one another in an effort to strong-arm their way into the discussion. Sometimes it seems like some columnists are running for the President of Sports with one strong platform: "I'm tougher on crime than my opponents."

Given, what Belichick did deserves punishment. He broke specific rules concerning the monitoring of another team. What all of these self-righteous yahoos fail to recognize is that what Bill Belichick helped his team gain a distinct advantage that absolutely earned him and his franchise far more than the fines and penalties they incurred. Depending on who you talk to, he's been doing this for some time. If so, he was able to get away with something most teams dream of being able to pull off. He successfully stole the other team's advantage. And in the end, he is only accountable to himself and his franchise. The NFL can impose penalties until they are blue in the face, but until those penalties outweigh the gains derived from the infractions, they'll be useless. If you asked Patriots owner Robert Kraft if he would take a paltry fine and the loss of a draft pick for three Super Bowl championships and a position as a premier NFL franchise...well, you see the obvious answer here.

Other writers have made other logically faulty arguments defending Belichick's actions as just and simply of a competitive nature. These are not accurate either. Stealing signs in baseball has always been the norm, but nobody has been outed for using extra means to attain them, i.e. electronic means. You can bet it's been done though. They've just been too sneaky to get caught. Now that this business about Belichick has come about, the likelihood that anyone will will be caught in the future is slim. There are plenty of ways to survey another team without having a cameraman blatantly standing on the sidelines.

Stealing another team's advantage has been around since sports began. It will continue to be prevalent, even if the perpetrators go uncovered.

Reasonably yours,
Scooter
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NFL needs a common sense injection

Wade Wilson, Cowboys quarterbacks coach will have five weeks off.

It was announced today that Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks coach Wade Wilson will be suspended for 5 games and fined $100,000 for possessing a banned substance.

In the wake of New England safety Rodney Harrisson admitting to using human growth hormone, it was discovered Wilson, who is a diabetic, had also acquired banned substances to help him deal with his diabetes.

So, taking a hard-line stance against banned substances, commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL took action against Wilson as harshly as they could.

Did this strike anyone else as being incredibly off base? It's such an odd story. Why would the NFL penalize a coach for taking medicine that helps him deal with something as serious as diabetes? He's a coach, after all, and isn't playing or testing his physical mettle. HGH is a physical aid, not mental, and he was obviously taking it for a serious medical condition. He even admitted that he took it and made no excuses. He obviously wasn't trying to hide anything and was taking care of himself.

"If I was trying to hide something I wouldn’t have put it on a credit card. I had no idea this was illegal or against league policy."

It's a move that lacks common sense and represents the overzealous nature that Goddell has displayed thus far in his tenure as commissioner.

Normally I have no qualms in damning rule breakers to the consequences of their actions, but I make exception in this siutaiton. The NFL obviously has a lot of image and behavior problems, but punishing a diabetic 48-year-old quarterbacks coach isn't the way to clean it up.

Reasonably yours,
Scooter
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Three leagues can thank the others for screwing up

A perfect storm of bad behavior is keeping the three main leagues from buckling under their own mischief.

With the recent outbreak of ne'r-do-wells in sports, it makes one wonder if any one sport will fall in popularity for the transgressions of the people involved with each sports.

What everyone refuses to recognize among the overreaction is that each one of these seeming horrid events benefits the other two leagues.

Right now, the biggest three stories/controversies are split among the United States' three major sports league. Michael Vick's dogfighting charges, Tim Donaghy's betting scandal and Barry Bonds' imminent breaking of the all-time home run record are dominating headlines, causing some to declare that everything sucks.

But, because these three events are culminating at the same time, each sports league is getting a small reprieve. Every league right now has a great argument that the other league is worse for their transgressions.

The NBA can look at the NFL and MLB and say "Hey, at least none of our superstars are accused in this betting mess. At least our players have some integrity, unlike a certain cantaloupe-headed slugger and that animal-murdering demon."

Major League Baseball can look at the NBA and NFL and say "Nothing has been proven about our supposed bad guy. He doesn't murder animals, and he doesn't bet on games. He plays his games and does not break the rules."

And finally, the NFL has a very strong statement: "At least the integrity of our actual sport hasn't been compromised. Zing."

If these events were happening at separate times, I imagine fans would likely be in more of an uproar toward that particular sport. But, because all three of the sports are in the middle of a perfect storm of misbehavior, each one is let off the hook a little bit. In the end, nobody will stop following sports because of all this mess. Animals lovers who like the NFL will still follow the NFL. People who follow the NBA will still follow the NBA and have more interesting speculations about refereeing. And nobody will care about Bonds breaking the record when A-Rod laps him.

In the end, the respective commissioners for each of these leagues is likely thanking the other two leagues for crapping the bed at the same time.

Scooter's signature:

Reasonably yours,
Scooter
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That's only enough time for one Chad Johnson end-zone dance

Earlier this week, the NFL began a campaign to actively shift the media’s focus on the league from athletic and coaching related activities towards more accessible media topics like dog fighting. If a reporter were video taping at the court house in Richmond this week, they would be welcomed with unfettered access to investigator press conferences and interviews with Michael Vick’s attorney’s and Federal prosecutors. The content of these interviews could then be freely posted on the reporter’s online media source. However, if the same reporter were to travel to Atlanta and interview Bobby Petrino, the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, and a few of Vick’s teammates working out at the team’s training facility, the reporter’s website would only be allowed to air a total of 45 seconds worth of footage. Why the discrepancy? The National Football League has recently announced that it will begin limiting online sources to 45 seconds per day of audio and video footage recorded on NFL property. After 24 hours, this footage must be removed and the segments have to link back to NFL.com and the pertinent team website.

For a lot of the print newspapers that have had to rely more and more on their electronic format for revenue, this seems like a pretty severe blow, but hardly a death knell. A talented group of writers can draw tons of readers through more creative online content. I would certainly hope that in the realm of everyday team coverage, a football fan would be able to find more sophisticated coverage among the professional sports writers of the newspapers than in the blog world or on the team websites. If not, then they probably shouldn’t be professional sports writers.

As for the NFL, it should come as no surprise to the readers of this blog that I believe the NFL is completely within their rights to limit video and audio broadcast of their product online. They have also not interfered with the online newspapers’ ability to broadcast interviews with players and coaches that are not recorded on NFL property. Any newspaper looking for video clips only needs to place a reporter and a camera in a strip club or gun shop right outside the team’s training facility and wait. Having had the opportunity myself to hang out with NFL stars in this environment leads me to believe that they can be much more engaging and interesting from a fan’s perspective. This example was mainly inserted for humor…mainly, but it shows that just maybe there would be a creative way for online newspapers to provide their readers with content that the NFL could not limit.

Those that are most upset about this new rule keep rambling on about how the NFL would not be what it is today without the coverage provided by the print media, but perhaps the NFL, in conjunction with most other major sports, could say the same thing. But that’s all history now. The NFL has a new television network, and every team has its own website. Times have changed, and there really isn’t anything that the NFL needs from the print media (this point can be argued, but that seems to be how the league feels) in order for its fans to be updated with current information. Fans in other arenas have begun to move their patronage elsewhere as well. Have you noticed that the stock listings section of your local newspaper has been drastically reduced or disappeared all together? Why would I unfold some big cumbersome piece of paper to find out what yesterday’s close price was whenever I could just go online and get the current price straight from the exchange? The NFL is simply following a trend in the distribution of information, where the middle-men are being taken out more and more. The online print sports guys should take a cue from their business page colleagues. Just because they don’t print the stock listings anymore, doesn’t mean they have to quit their job. I read the Wall Street Journal (online) religiously every day, and I pay a sizable sum for it. I don’t do it because that’s where I can find security prices, I do it because they write interesting articles and provide me with valuable insight that I use to make decisions both at home and at work. Put more simply, intelligent writing will attract readers more than video clips.

If the newspapers do decide to push what little leverage they have in this situation, they can simply forget to report whenever one of the NFL players does something for charity (having lived in St. Louis during the Warner years, the purchase of a home for a low-income family was an everyday occurrence), or they could report a whole lot whenever a player gets busted driving drunk in possession of a firearm.

All in all, I doubt this new rule has much effect on anything. The NFL can do whatever it wants. It really isn’t worth speculating whether or not this is a good business decision on the part of the league…Never mind, I speculate that this is probably a pretty good business decision for the league. They lose nothing while at the same time providing their sponsors with exclusivity. The newspapers have to realize, that anyone can make “online news,” I’m doing it right now, but as far as competition is concerned, I am setting the bar pretty low.

Travis
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Playing the athlete stock market

Every once in awhile, you find a unique concept that is just so damn cool you have to mess with it for a few days before you really understand the parameters of how it works and the implications of it on your daily life.

Welcome to Protrade.com, another in the long line of awesome time wasters I consume on a daily basis.

It's like fantasy sports meets the stock market, and if you have a basic understanding of each, you can jump right into this thing with a few short tutorials.

When you register to the site, you start out with $5,000 in Protrade Dollars (fake money) that you have to trade for players and teams. At the beginning of each season, Protrade puts a dollar value on each player in the league. Once the season begins, Protrade users can go buck wild, buying players who they believe are undervalued and shorting (betting against) players they think are overvalued. As players are purchased, their price goes up, as players are sold, their price goes down. At the end of the season, they have an Earnings Day, where you cash out all the players you purchased during the season and (hopefully) make money off of said players. They currently offer MLB, NBA, NFL, NCAA men's basketball (teams only) and a Beta version of Golf (sorry NHL, nobody cares about you).

As you build up Protrade Dollars, you can cash them in for various levels of prizes, from crappy giveaway stuff with the Protrade logo, all the way up iPods and autographed jerseys. Although I imagine you'd really have to play it to earn enough Protrade dollars to cash in for a signed jersey (a signed Troy Aikman jersey will cost you 1.25 million Protrade Dollars), the fun of playing the stock market with players intrigues the hell out of me even if the prospect of earning the top prizes is unbelievably far away.

You can also register for challenges that cost you a little Protrade Dollars to enter, and give you the potential of earning lots of Protrade dollars (I am currently in one with a prize of $250,000).

If this sounds intriguing to you, trust me, it is. As I noodle along and buy and sell MLB players and teams, I can't do anything but drool at the prospect of playing this thing during the NBA season. Or maybe that's the anaesthetic from the dentist's office this morning.

Reasonably yours,
Scooter
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