At this point, it seems like the New England Patriots altered the footballs used in the AFC Championship. Eleven of 12 footballs used experienced an amount of deflation that falls outside of the rulebook's boundaries, in between the time referees looked at them before the game and halftime. Yet, there were no similar problems with the team's backup footballs. Even if everybody on the team denies accountability and we can't prove 100 percent certain somebody messed with the balls, it seems very likely.
This has led to people saying the Patriots should be banned from the Super Bowl. This has led to people saying Bill Belichick should be fired. This has led to people saying nothing the Patriots do matters, because this has made everything illegitimate. A week before the Super Bowl, this is the primary topic of football conversation.
I think we need to slow our collective roll. The Patriots cheated, and they deserve to be punished. But a seemingly minor thing has been blown way out of proportion.
A lot of quarterbacks alter footballs
Aaron Rodgers has said he likes to overinflate footballs and see if referees notice. Brad Johnson openly admits to paying someone off to tamper with footballs before Super Bowl 37. The NFL warned the Panthers and Vikings after video of sideline attendants heating balls to keep them warm and soft during a freezing November game, although it's not quite clear whether it was the Panthers, Vikings or both that were illegally heating the footballs.
The Patriots might have done something illegal, but it seems to be something illegal that nearly everyone does. This was not a plan concocted by an evil football supervillain. It seems pretty common, actually.
This had a pretty minor effect on football
The Patriots are in the Super Bowl and used deflated balls in a game. They are not in the Super Bowl because they used deflated balls in a game.
The footballs in question were used for one team's offense for one half of one game. Andrew Luck was not playing with altered footballs when he had the worst game of his pro career. The Patriots' defense did not benefit from football-related tomfoolery when they held their opponents to seven points.
Deflated footballs don't have as big of an effect on the running game, and LeGarrette Blount eviscerated the Colts. Tom Brady actually threw the ball better with regular footballs than the deflated ones:
Under-inflated in the first half: Brady 11/21 (52%), 1 TD, 1 INT. Regular inflated in the second half: Brady 12/14 (86%), 2 TD, 0 INT
— Mark Daniels (@MarkDanielsPJ) January 21, 2015
The Patriots demolished the Colts for reasons primarily not related to the Patriots' cheating.
You might say this instance of cheating casts the Patriots' entire season into doubt. After all, it seems unlikely that the team got caught the one time they tried to pull a fast one.
Underinflating a ball is supposed to make it feel different, but the Pats played 17 games this year without referees or players noticing anything wrong with the ball. We have no way of knowing whether the Patriots cheated all season long, and if they were, the difference it made was apparently imperceptible to hundreds of people who could have noticed.
Calling every Patriots' game into question over one instance is rampant speculation. And if we're doing that, we apparently have to call every game the Packers, Panthers and Vikings ever played into question, because we know they do this also.
SB Nation presents: What every Pats fan is thinking about DeflateGate
The NFL has a punishment for this, and it's minor
The NFL's proposed fine for altering footballs is $25,000. (ESPN's Chris Mortensen says "up to $25,000," the Boston Globe says a minimum penalty of $25,000.) Marshawn Lynch got fined $20,000 for putting his hand on his crotch. The league thinks playing with footballs is only 25 percent more worrisome than penis-touching.
When someone shoplifts, we don't sentence them to life in prison. We don't say, "Well, if they were shoplifting THIS TIME, imagine how many times they must've tried shoplifting in the past!" We give them a minor penalty.
The Patriots are the football equivalent of shoplifters. They tried to skirt the rules to make life slightly easier for themselves, hoping nobody would notice. They deserve a fitting punishment.
There are things the Pats could have done that would make a Super Bowl ban reasonable, like if they had paid off officials to make certain calls, or if they'd promised players on the Colts something in exchange for a bad performance.
They didn't do any of that. They mildly altered their own footballs.
Of course, the NFL's punishment system has come into question over the past year. But those were concerns with the league's horrendously backwards personal conduct policy.
Please do not compare deflating footballs to savagely beating a human being. If you think these are comparable things, you take football too seriously and devalue the importance of your fellow humans, both of which are problems.
If you think the Patriots deserve to be punished, you're right. If you think cheating is bad, and you think Bill Belichick the Patriots are cheaters, and this causes you to lose respect for them, that's just fine.
If you think the Patriots shouldn't be in the Super Bowl because they made footballs easier for their own quarterback to throw in a way he preferred, you don't understand how punishments work.
(I wholeheartedly expect to receive several emails or comments accusing me of being a biased Patriots fan/homer, so I'd like to state up front that I'm a New York Jets fan.) (I still expect to receive these emails, because people are bad at reading.)