MattM

Uhh, they get 11 days' rest against us in Week 2 and get an extra says' rest by playing us on Monday night, so once again, schedule advantage Pats*. Anyone else sick of this crap?

I hate it--the barbelled nature of it (first two and last two all home with a streak of five away games in six weeks in the middle) just sucks

Nice to see the Cheats* get extra rest against us yet again. How many !@#$ing times has that happened over the last ten years? WTF....

It all depends on where you draw the boundaries of the inquiry. They went way back in this article. I'd wager that the Pats* move way up that list if you look at only the last five or six years, for ex., as I seem to recall them having several recent seasons (not just the one mentioned) with zero or one (the avg per team should be two) such games. For ex., I remember us having a League record 9 or 10 such games over a 2 year period that saw them have like 1 such game, although I could be wrong as I'm too lazy to look that up. For those downplaying the importance of this, I also recall a NYT article on NFL schedule making two years ago in which the maker was quoted as saying that by far the most frequent request he got was--wait for it---don't give us games against teams with extra rest. So it looks to me like teams, coaches and players would disagree with you on the level of importance here. As noted above, I was very glad when Whaley basically called BS on this two years ago. Notice we haven't had any of those 4 or 5 game seasons since?

They deal with that in the article. A 4% worse chance of winning against a team with more rest--although some years it was much higher (like 14% in 2010). Personally, I was ecstatic to see Whaley publicly shame the NFL on this crap a few years back, after we had 9 better rested opponents in two years....

My favorite is still Flutie going on local radio after Spygate broke and saying he once picked up a QB helmet by mistake on the sidelines and the Coaches were still talking to the QB well after the League-mandated cutoff. He was initially treating it like a joke. Seems like someone then talked to him about that since I don't believe he repeated that story any time thereafter. All detailed in O'Leary's Spygate book for those interested.

Don't forget that Rodney Harrison got caught there the only way you could--by being dumb enough to buy HGH in his own name and shipping it to his house from a pharmacy that got busted selling steroids. Anyone else ever wonder how all those old vets on their early teams seemed to regain a step while there? Or how a few years back they had 3 of the 5 RBs in the whole League 32 or older (Morris, Taylor and Faulk)?

I had thought that might be the case, too, but the Fitz timeline overlap intrigued me....

Oh, well, the conjecture was fun while it lasted....

I also seem to recall Fitz often taking vacations/trips post-season as a way to clear the head, but could be wrong. My bro-in-law is an older Harvard football player ('85) and met Fitz and his family at a reunion tour of the football facilities in 2010. Said he seemed like a very nice and genuine guy, FWIW.

As a longtime, high count poster, can't tell if you're serious or not, but NGU was an insider posting inside info a few years back. Nice guy, but a bit mysterious (and almost always right on his inside stuff).

You make the call.... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/sports/hockey/a-sabres-fans-lament-they-cant-lose-them-all.html?_r=0 Check out the bottom: "My sons, James, 5, and Leo, 7, have never lived in Buffalo, but they support the Bills and the Sabres. In 2011, Leo got an autographed football bearing the inscription “Never Give Up” from the former Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick after being punched at school for supporting the Bills. So last week he couldn’t understand why I was so angry that the Sabres were beating the Blackhawks. “Why are you rooting against our team?” he asked. I tried to explain that we were fighting for last place and needed to keep losing to get a really good player, but he wasn’t buying it. “Fitzpatrick said never give up, Dad,” Leo said. I took his point, but as this ignominious season winds down, I will be rooting hard for a fitting conclusion: another loss. I believe in you, Sabres. I know you can do it."

As many of us originally predicted, the League is just waiting for another major news event to suck the media air out of the findings, so I predict that the report will be released either (a) after said other big news event or (b) late on a Friday night to try to avoid a major news cycle. Should make for some interesting reading for those so inclined....

Rodak embarrassed himself when he listed Mario as someone we misvalued and overpaid for. Anyone watching him these past three years can see that he's been worth the contract. In fact, Peter King today listed Mario as one of the few examples in recent League history when paying a huge salary actually turned out to be a good deal. Where does ESPN get these guys?

We'll replace Alonzo/Spikes with David Harris at LB--he's 31, but should fill that "bill" this year at least without dropoff.

My fellow Matt--I noticed the same thing on the Brady play (and said that in the original thread). I was at the game, but from watching it on the jumbotron I wondered how in holy hell did he hang onto the ball when Hughes tomahawk chopped him. That's the problem with the Pats*--everything they do is subject to a sheen of cynicism about whether they were cheating or not. Billy B brought that on himself over the years....

I'm sure the Wells report is already written and they're just waiting for the right moment (ie, at the same time as something much bigger, so as to keep it off the front page) to release it. Get out the brooms, folks.....

I read on another thread that he played 99% of the D snaps in NY, so he can't be that bad

I remember really wanting Harris when he was a FA a few years back before re-signing with the Jets. I just hope that if we get him, with his age he doesn't turn into the second coming of Eddie Robinson.....

I logged in solely to write the term "condescending", but looks like you effectively beat me to it!

This is a competition matter much like a penalty call would be. Do you want teams to be able to take the League to court over penalty calls? The league can set its own competition rules and the courts should stay the heck away from trying to administer them. All the Pats* defenders ball washing on this point is getting ridiculous. In the hypothetical I gave above (since none of us knows the facts here) all that's required is for a league official to have conducted those measurements and made those findings--case closed. The idea that the Pats* should be able to then go to court to demand more proof before league punishment is ridiculous. It's ideas like that that give lawyers a bad name in our sue happy society. While it's true that anyone can sue for anything in our country, a court should be very careful before setting a precedent of weighing in on essentially a private league's competition matter.

You have no understanding of the criminal process and the role of defense lawyers. Defense attorneys are not obligated to present a defense. The standard of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt is for the prosecution to prove in court. This inflate issue that has brought out the rabid and conspiratorial responses of Bills fans compared to fans at large is a testatment to the losing mentality associated with this historically bumbling franchise. The issue for me has little to do with right or wrong as it does with proportionality. While the enraged Buffalo fans are apopolectic regarding the possible tampering with balls by the Patriots there is little response regarding the inappropriate handling of balls in the Atlanta and Carolina game. http://espn.go.com/blog/minnesota-vikings/post/_/id/11218/nfl-aware-of-game-ball-incident-during-panthers-vikings I said it before and I say it again making excuses why your team regularly losers and making excuses why other teams win is a sad display of a losing mentality associated with the home town fans. It is embarrassing. Dude--I AM a lawyer, with an honors degree from a school in the Boston area whose first name starts with an H. I fully understand how the burden of proof works and how quite often the entire game is based on getting the standard set high or low. It's absolutely ridiculous that we're even comparing this to a legal matter and legal standard of proof issues, criminal or civil. This is a private organization, which can set its own rules and its own standards. If the League's officials say there was a problem, then that should be the end of it, none of this "evidence beyond a reasonable doubt crap" that is being flung by the Pats* and their apologists (I'm looking at you, Florio). They're clearly doing their best to set the proof bar as high as they can in order to wriggle out of this in the court of public opinion. Utter nonsense, which actually further convinces me that there is indeed something rotten in Denmark, else wise why all the spin? Time will tell on the facts--none of us knows what they are, but we'll find out hopefully soon, Pneumonic--on the science point, I seem to recall someone early on saying that to deflate 2 psi the temperature would need to go from something like 75 to minus 10. Were they correct? I also have read articles in which a Columbia professor was asked what he thought happened and he said tampering was the most likely culprit (I'm sure Kraft--a wealthy alum and donor--was not pleased). Same story from a a College of Staten Island prof. Shouldn't this be an eminently solvable problem from a science standpoint? Why the apparent disagreement? That makes little sense to me.

If that turns out to be the case, then that might happen naturally and so it would be tough to blame the Pats* on that. Early reports, however, were that most Pats* balls were 2 psi below normal, which, if true, would mean tampering if the Colts balls were all still within the accepted range, don't you agree? Unless the Pats*, in addition to their own officials, get their own rules of physics, too. I will save you the trouble of posting that those initial reports were then followed by pro-Pats* leaks (Florio again, among others) claiming that most Pats* balls were barely under 12.5 psi. To borrow from St Doug, "obviously" we'll need to see what the facts turn out to be here before any conclusions can be made.

What standard of proof do you want? Guessing in order to support your biases. It's bad enough making excuses why the Bills lose so often but now it has gotten to the pathetic point where the jealous home town crowd has restorted to making excuses while others win. Losing with dignity can be respected but losing without grace is ugly and classless. I laid out my standard of proof above--if the League's officials measured all balls pre-game and found them compliant and then measured them again at halftime and found the Pats*' balls to be non-compliant and the Colts' balks to be compliant that's really all you need to know to implicate tampering and mete out punishment. All of the recent garbage about "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Florio and other Pats' mouthpieces are putting out there to muddy the waters is just that--garbage designed to obfuscate the real issue. What they're doing is something criminal defense lawyers have gotten quite good at recently--setting the proof bar so high that no one is ever guilty of anything. The obvious difference here is that this is not a criminal trial and such severe proof standards should not apply, despite Mr. Florio's recent attempts to spin it otherwise. Seems pretty obvious to me, but just like Belicheat tried to do with his laughable press conference, they're trying to create in advance a defense where there should not be one. Your continued dismissal of any criticism of the Pats* has gotten quite old, BTW. As we've seen in many areas of sports (Lance Armstrong, the steroid era in baseball, Spygate, etc.) and society (Wall Street and politics come to mind), cheaters do quite often prosper, but that's all the more reason to hold folks fully accountable when caught. Otherwise, the message being sent is it's ok to cheat as long as you win, which personally is not the message that I think society should be sending. Think the Pats* are some poor, unjustly accused franchise? Go read O'Leary's book on Spygate or if you don't have the time, the NYT article from May, 2008 in which several members of the NFL competition committee state that it was really just one team brought before them for suspicion of cheating, over and over again. Any guess as to which team that was? We don't know what will actually be found by the committee (assuming it's not just a big cover up like Spygate turned out to be when Goodell destroyed the tapes and then lied about how extensive the practice was, as was later shown by the tapes Matt Walsh produced), but if the evidence is as I laid it out above the Pats* should be punished. Period. Full stop. All of this has nothing to do with the Bills losing, other than perhaps cheating in our games, but you always seem to conflate the two. One can fault the Bills for fielding bad teams while still pointing out that the Patriots* cheated. The latter is by no means an excuse for the former and no one here is saying it is.

That's exactly what all the Florio garbage about the standard of proof here is--an attempt to obfuscate what I suspect will be the fact that their balls were markedly and measurably lower at halftime than when they were initially tested pregame. Hopefully they tested the Colts balls both times as well. If so, and they turn out to not have lowered their psi anywhere near the Pats* level, that's really all you need to know here to prove tampering. None of this "beyond a reasonable doubt" crap that Florio and the Pats* have been peddling the last few weeks in an effort to obfuscate and argue that they did nothing wrong since there isn't "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." This ain't a criminal trial and no one's going to jail as a result, so no need for such a (these days) nearly impossible standard of proof....