My Thoughts for February 1, 2015

Are you ready for some football?  Yep, have been all season and as a “12^th” man member it’s been an exciting year.  I’m glad today is finally game day for the Super Bowl.  After a week of super-hyping the game, I’m over the top with football.  In fact, no matter who wins, I’ll be glad to see it all end.  I’ll need months to rest up; for this ole fart, it’s been exhausting. 

And if all the normal super-hype wasn’t enough, we got hit with “deflategate.”  Give me a break.  It looks to me like the NFL took a play right out of the Sony Corporation’s playbook and presented us with a scenario not unlike the claim that the North Koreans attacked a Sony movie.  That marketing ploy by Sony made millions for a loser of a movie.

Deflategate has done similar for the NFL, including Bill Belichick claiming “I’ve handled dozens of balls over the past week”; Tom Brady asserting after he picks his balls, they are perfect, he “doesn’t want anybody touching my balls after that, I don’t want anybody rubbing them … to me those balls are perfect”; and, Richard Sherman proclaiming, “It is what it is. Their (the Patriots) resume speaks for itself.”  Hey, who wrote the script for these guys?  I’m willing to bet the NFL hire a couple writers from Sony’s stable of scriptwriters. What a production, maybe it’ll win an Oscar. They even brought out old Joe Montana to make a few superfluous comments.

There is an interesting science fact attached to this escapade.  If you take a football into a sauna bath which is at least 125 degrees, inflate the professional pigskin to the league requirement of between 12.5 lbs and 13.5 lbs, then run outside into cold weather, the ball will deflate to about 9 lbs.   I’m not accusing anybody, but the Colts-Patriots’ game was the late game that Sunday. This curmudgeon was totally exhausted from the Seahawk’s illustrious comeback in the last couple of minutes of their game (truly, the greatest comeback in modern football).  Anyway, I know I dozed off several times from sheer physical exhaustion during the late game. Wasn’t the Colts-Patriots’ game played in Foxborough, Mass., where just few days ago the area was hit with record snow?  Gillette Stadium is an outdoor venue, right?  Not that I’m accusing anyone. I admit I dozed. But wasn’t the outdoor temperature only about 49*F?

GQ magazine reported that Roger Goodell in his boyhood had dreams of becoming the commissioner of the NFL.  Wow!  This year for Roger has been a great example of “be careful what you wish for, you might just get.”  There was the Ray Rice incident where Rice gave his future wife a left-hook that even George Forman would be envious.  Then there was the Adrian Peterson child abuse incident in which apparently Adrian used a hickory stick to discipline his child.  And, finally there was the Commissioner on CBS being thrashed about by Norah O’Donnell, not that that’s a bad thing.  In fact the Commissioner must have enjoyed the back-and-forth because he kept denying seeing any video of Rice’s famous heavyweight punch to his fiancée defenseless jaw.  I don’t think Roger and Norah made up like Rice and his fiancée.

What the NFL did was look for a scape-goat; some poor soul, a lowly peon, if you will, to take the wrap.  Just so you get a good understanding of what the NFL is trying to do, here’s Webster’s definition of peon, “a person who does hard or boring work for very little money: a person who is not very important in a society or organization.”   Guess what?  According to Fox Sports, “The National Football League has zeroed in on a locker room attendant as a ‘strong person of interest’ in the historic event known as ‘deflategate.’” 

According to an ESPN report, a video exists that shows a lowly locker room attendant taking a bag of balls into “another area.” It was a bathroom, for crying out loud. The poor guy was excited to be carrying Brady’s balls around and had to pee. Give the unimportant person a break.  Gees, didn’t they have surveillance in the can?  If they had, we might have seen Brady’s balls receiving a Ray Rice left-hook or the locker attendant beating the hell out of Brady’s balls with an Adrian Peterson hickory stick.   

Outside of that, I’m a “12-man fan” so I’m hoping for the Seahawks to beat all the Patriot’s balls and win the Super Bowl. GO HAWKS!