Jan 24, 2015 5 min read

Had enough of Deflategate?

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving organization. The New England Patriots are known cheaters. Everybody remembers Spygate.

The Patriots had a first-round draft pick taken away and head coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 for illegally taping the signals of opposing teams.

The Patriots and the NFL would like you to believe it wasn’t a big deal and it gave them no real competitive advantage.

Ridiculous.

First-round draft picks are cherished a little less than the average NFL coach’s first born child. Only a serious offense would move a commissioner to take one away.

And, of course, the NFL destroyed the video.

As of Friday, as far as anybody knew, the NFL had not contacted Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to ask him if he knew anything about how 11 of the Patriots’ 12 footballs for the AFC Championship game became underinflated.

The NFL has been investigating the situation since last Sunday, but it wants this story to go away.

It might if President Obama were to sign an exectutive order some time in the next 15 minutes banning all sports talk shows.

Sorry, this one is going to linger until the Super Bowl kickoff and beyond.

And it should.

If you are among the many who dismiss the issue because the Patriots blew out the Indianapolis Colts, 45-7, in the AFC Championship game, then you’re missing the point.

If the balls were deflated to accommodate Brady and the wet conditions, then it was done because somebody thought it would make it easier for him to throw the ball.

The Colts’ quarterback, Andrew Luck, as far as we know, never got a chance to throw an easier-to-grip ball. He completed 12 of 33 attempts for 126 yards and two interceptions.

Could he have done better with a ball that was more conducive to throwing in wet weather?

We don’t know because Luck didn’t cheat to find out.

If the Patriots spiked Luck’s pregame meal with Ex-Lax, would that have been dismissed because of the 45 points scored by the Patriots?

Did Nancy Kerrigan winning the silver medal at the 1994 Winter Olympics make the attempt by Tonya Harding’s husband and friends to eliminate Kerrigan from the competition by smashing her leg with a police baton any less relevant?

And don’t let anybody tell you NFL teams aren’t protective of their footballs. I traveled on the Steelers’ team charter to every away game in 2007. That was the first year of the rules change – pushed by Brady and Peyton Manning – that called for the visiting team to provide their own footballs instead of having the home team provide them for both teams.

The Steelers brought their ball “boy,” a 50-something man, on the plane and put him up in the team hotel. His only job was to take care of the footballs.

By virtue of their record, the Patriots also were given a built-in advantage in the AFC Championship game. It’s called home-field advantage. And that advantage is increased at least a little when a team in a cold-weather city is hosting a team that plays its home games in a dome.

Ask Peyton Manning.

So, it is not hard at all to believe Brady, Belichick and/or the entire Patriots organization would try to enhance that outdoor advantage a little more by negating the wet weather with an easier-to-grip football.

According to the NFL’s investigation, the deflated balls were discovered at halftime and replaced by fully inflated balls in the second half.

Would Brady having to play with a football as slippery as the one Luck played with in the first half have been enough to overcome a 45-7 blowout?

We’ll never know.

That’s why another Patriots’ AFC Championship will always be tainted.

• Art Rooney II wasted his time telling the media why Dick LeBeau is no longer the Steelers’ defensive coordinator. He’s had zero credibility on the subject since Bruce Arians “retired.”

• The fans who paid for tickets to the NHL All-Star Game in Columbus are being cheated when stars like Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin don’t show up. That’s why the NHL has a rule that prevents players who don’t play in the All-Star Game from playing in the first regular-season game after the break.

That’s a nice incentive for teams to make sure their stars make every effort to show up, but it sure stinks for fans who bought tickets to that first game after the break.

Lots of people paid lots of money for Tuesday night’s game at Consol Energy Center. Neither Crosby nor Malkin will play. Not too many people bought tickets because of the Winnipeg Jets.

It’s just one more reason for all the major sports leagues to eliminate all-star games.

When you have former players picking up sides, that’s a pretty good sign the idea is dead.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.