New Football Analytics Book Begins by Repeating Lies About the Patriots/Rams Walk Through Tape and Deflategate
As hard as this might be to fathom, every once in a great while Patriots fans get accused of being paranoid, thin-skinned whiners, obsessed with looking for disrespect of any kind and incapable of letting their team take any criticism at all. And believe it or not, sometimes that knock gets directed at certain lovable, older-but-boyishly-handsome Patriots loyalists who cover the team for a living. No, no. It’s true. I mean, I’ll give you a minute to process the absurdity of that claim. But you hear it from time to time.
Which brings me to this football analytics book which is coming out, by an outfit called SharpFootball, which I go to from time to time and think they’re one of the more useful analytics sites going. And that book will have a foreword by Evan Silva, a writer with whom I have no beef whatsoever. But here’s an excerpt of that foreward in a Tweet, which has since been deleted but not before someone made a screen grab:
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To say again, I have no axe to grind with the author. I’m not about to go all ad hominem on him or anyone at SharpFootball. This is just to make the point that if you think Pats fans are all a bunch of deranged lunatics, holed up in our Doomsday filled with enough canned goods and ammo to last us through Helter Skelter, communicating with each other in code over our Ham radios while recycling our piss for drinking water, here is why. Or more specifically, just one of a million reasons why.
Here we have a new book that supposed to be about breaking down the 2018 NFL season, and not five paragraphs into it there are two – count ‘em, two – lies about ways the Patriots cheat. The defending Super Bowl champion Patriots, just so we’re clear. Followed by the correct assertion that John Harbaugh falsely accused them of cheating. Because while Evan Silva “had a blast” working on it, what he didn’t have was a sense of irony.
This is life when you’re partial to this particular franchise. They win a Super Bowl at the end of a remarkable, triumphant season that at times was filled with doubt, suspension, injuries and followed an off-season of supposed turmoil. Nothing about the way they bounced back from plays deemed so historic they got their own names, “The Miracle in Miami” and Pittsburgh’s “The Pick.” Nothing about how they found ways to beat the top rated QBs in the game, including Aaron Rodgers, Andrew Luck, Phillip Rivers, Jared Goff and Patrick Mahomes twice. No mention of the AFC championship game, which was an all time classic. Possibly one of the ten best postseason games ever played. Not a word about the fact they held the hottest coaching commodity in the league and his 11th most prolific offense of all time to just three points, the lowest total in Super Bowl history.
Nope. They just go to the default setting. Total lies about taping the Rams walk through in February of 2002 and deflating footballs in 2015. Both claims long since discredited:
–John Tomase first wrote the Rams walk through story in February of 2008. By May of that year he had to admit he was wrong. No such tape exists. Because no such tape ever existed. His paper The Herald printed a front page retraction and apologized to the Patriots.
–The footballs in the AFC title game were deflated by the cold. That’s not my opinion, it’s a matter of fact. Irrefutable, basic, elementary, proven, verifiable scientific fact. Simple physics. PV = nRT. Grasped by chemists and socially awkward teens alike:
But the facts are never going to get in the way of a good story. Not when it comes to this one team. They one time pointed a camera at the Jets sideline from an area of the stadium other than the one where you’re allowed to point a camera at the sidelines. And 12 years later we’re still having to defend them for every offense from non-existent videos to psi figures to fucking up the new “Star Wars” trilogy before we know it.
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And this is why we are the way we are. New Englanders will stop going all aluminum foil hat when the rest of the world stops spreading these lies. I say again: Just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t really out to get us.