MattM

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....

Sorry, but I'd rather take the word of two NY college professors (one from Columbia and the other who has a Harvard degree) who said in the NYT that it was likely done via tampering with the balls over some NE* fanboy experiment

Oh, for sure on that, but the spin lately from him is all one way, rather than a hit maximizing two ways. He was all over the Pats* on this initially, but 2-3 weeks ago took a hard turn in the other directions in a very noticeable way

I'm not sure the first part is fair--they ALL look like men among boys in college, that's why they're top QBs. That said, I thought Jameis regressed last year. His Heisman year he looked like he might in fact be in the Manning/Luck class. Last year, not so much.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that Florio seems to have turned into a Pats*/Kraft mouthpiece the last few weeks? Every time something damaging about the Pats* comes out in the regular press, suddenly Florio has some other leaked pro-Pats* spin tidbit. He also is keen on trying to infuse all of this with the high level of proof that comes from a criminal case, which is totally ridiculous considering what we're talking about. Personally, if League officials measured both sets of balls pre-game and then again at halftime and found one set had lost 2 pounds or so of pressure as a general matter, while the others didn't, that's really all we need to know to be convinced there was tampering. All this sideshow about a post game chain of custody and the guy later selling the balls is just garbage. I also noticed a commenter there in the latest cycle of garbage articles yesterday claiming to be a long time "associate" of the Jets who claimed inside knowledge of the NFL's investigation saying that Pats* fans/defenders wouldn't like the direction the investigation is now going in and that there were a number of currently non-public things that will come out in the report that those folks won't like. Who knows if the guy is for real, but it was an interesting comment. Might also explain all the pre-release obfuscation and spin.

I thought I'd read previously that Cutler's contract is such an albatross that he actually has negative trade value, i.e., the Bears would trade Cutler and their 3rd for another team's 4th (and only because the NFL demands some compensation go back to the team trading the player). I'm not a Cutler fan, but in such a case, it might convince even someone like me (depending on the other compensation) to give him a try....

That about cinches Pitt as the Pats* opponent first week of the season.

Tokyo, Japan. There for a (great) year for work. Listened to the first part of the game on Armed Forces radio (tape delay) and stomped out of my tiny apt sure the Bills lost. Only saw in the next day's Japan Times that we came back and won. My dad taped the game for me and I watched it 10 months later when I got home.

Prediction--they'll either release the report immediately after another major event that will soak up the news cycle's attention or late on a Friday in order to bury it. It will be March sometime at the earliest. Rog already has the broom out to help sweep this under the rug...,

You mean like last time?

From a sociological standpoint, it's interesting how many of them inherited their team's or the wealth they used to buy the team. Pegula's one of the few truly self-made folks on that list. Part of that's the nature of the NFL--the League's getting up there in age and teams often stay in the family--but that doesn't explain all of it, as even some relatively new owners like Stan (Walmart marrying) Kroenke, Woody (J&J) Johnson, and Bob (married the boss's daughter) Kraft show....

To me, it's their whole body of work/favoritism that kind of tells the story--from the cheating we know about (Spygate, letting IRed players practice, aging vets on HGH, etc.) to that which is suspected (headsets going out at Gillette, extra frequency on their headsets discovered in the Spygate investigation, suspicions that their locker room is bugged, "it was one team, really, brought before us over and over again" as per an NFL Competition Committee member, etc.) to the favoritism from the League office (favorable scheduling (as in rarely playing teams coming off a bye and getting either division games or quality opponents off their own bye), favorable treatment of their players (like Vince Wilfork not being suspended despite having 4 separate finable offenses in one season or Alphonso Dennard not getting any time off despite serving time in jail last year), etc.) It's really quite a body of work. All the while they act shocked (absolutely shocked!) when someone points out their less than honorable ways. That's what gets me about these guys.

I hate the Pats*, but I agree with this.

They're scumbags, so why are you surprised?

Congrats to the Cheats*--great game

Wow--just wow

Congrats to the Cheats* l🆗--Seattle shocked big time