I was going to ask why it takes so many pages to say “shut up and let me deal out punishment”, but I realize it takes 20 pages to justify other teams getting handed wins.

Those Angels also got $3.8 million.

A good friend of mine is a Jets fan and he keeps muttering something about how the Patriots play better when they have something to prove. He may be on to something.

yeah, but the league doesn’t need “proof”, they just need probable evidence, for which someone else’s phone getting a text from Brady’s number would be than enough. and if they even had that much they’d be showing it off and calling out Brady to show his side of where it came from, so it seems the league doesn’t have…

This whole thing is about a stupid as a ref calling “False start, number 12, offense. 38 yard penalty and loss of down. ... you should have cooperated more with the flag we threw.”

I would investigate him for gambling, because the last time I saw a beard like that someone had lost a bet.

Unless you’re in a stable orbit, you’re going to the ground right now, just very very slowly.

Eventually, they’ll just let everyone on the field do what they want, then huddle around the replay booth to decide how many yards to award for whatever happened. Score it like team based rhythmic gymnastics. (Swap out the ball for a ribbon if you’re the Patriots.)

You make the rule say “when viewed at normal speed”. That should work if you agree with the article that the original call on the field at normal speed was correct. You have to make the rule support *that* call, not support looking frame-by-frame for anything you can nitpick.

I think all we really need is a ruling to fix instant replay so this stuff stays as called on the field.

425 feet seems like a strange measure since you need to wait for a computer to figure it out. They should rephrase that - “in the upper deck” sounds so much simpler than measuring feet. So maybe particular this park it’d be the upper deck in left, anything to dead center, and more than 15 rows in right?

It’s one thing for him to personally verify the facts by seeing the source, vs reprinting the source itself.

if Bill Belichick calls this play, this discussion would be extremely different.

this one includes actual crime!

It’s certainly a different degree of courage when Vanity Fair is willing to back you up with a cover photoshoot.

This feels a bit like bandwagoning on ESPN’s part - especially to announce this so loudly now while the topic is trending but the award is a month and a half away.

My only (recurring) question is what it will take for the US to actually announce a boycott.

Per ESPN, “The vote was 30-2. Washington and Oakland voted no.”

Anyone want to datamine how many of the 256 regular season games last year either ended in a 1 point win, or went to overtime? Because those are probably the only games this affects - the odds of missing from 15 would make it unlikely to happen twice in a game.

As a generalization, I feel that for every game this rule prevents going to overtime - eg, team gets to 20 vs 21 and then missed the PAT - there’s going to be just as many games that go to overtime because of this rule - eg, 2 TD, 2 FG for 20, other team gets 3 TD to 20 but misses the PAT.