Very true but it’s ludicrous to continually give a pass to a team that cheats and everybody knows it. Telling a college team that they didn’t actually win a bowl game means nothing. Cutting an NFL team out of the Superbowl is actually punitive action. Taking away a draft pick and fining them pocket change is worthless. What’s going on now is worse than a joke. Either put some teeth into a real punishment or drop it entirely. The NFL has commissioned a blue ribbon commission that will find nothing and recommend that the ball boy be fired, which just makes them look exponentially worse.
Problem is this is a minor rule that multiple QBs admit to breaking all the time, and multiple teams got caught breaking it earlier this year with no punishment, and there is no actual punishment listed. Add in the fact that Dean Blandino (VP of officiating) said yesterday that there’s no recorded data on the pregame PSI of the balls so they very well could have been submitted under pressured and not detected and really all the kerfuffle is just stupid. IF the Pats did something (which has not been proven) it was negligible and nobody should care. They should drop it entirely, it’s a stupid rule. Many QBs think it should be gotten rid of, there’s really no logic as to why 12.5 to 13.5 is good but 12 or 14 are bad.
I think the blue ribbon commission is going to find that it’s a rule that’s largely ignored and the refs didn’t actually measure the PSI of the balls before the game, and the NFL needs to figure out why they even have a rule that everybody thinks is stupid and nobody even enforces.