“I’m not a sore loser! I just prefer to win! And when I don’t, I get furious!” – Ron Swanson
I am a lifelong New England Patriots fan, a season ticket holder of three years, and someone who despises losing. Losing is the worst. Anyone who thinks last place deserves a trophy, anyone who wants the joys of life handed to them without putting in any work, can hit the bricks. If winning didn’t matter they would cancel The World Cup, The Super Bowl, The Olympics…The word “The” would be in some serious trouble, much like my boy Tom is right now.
Tom Brady is the best quarterback of all time, but instead of basking in all of the honor and prestige which comes with winning a fourth Super Bowl, he’s currently dealing with the fallout from Watergate XXIX: The Deflator Strikes. Who’s to blame? Tom Brady, and Tom Brady alone.
After the upstanding organization known as the Baltimore Ravens blew two separate 14-point leads, they made a call to yet another upstanding organization, the Indianapolis Colts, to warn them about Brady’s maniacal, ball-deflating ways. The Colts lost by 485 points and immediately alerted their beat writers of Brady’s misdoings. The result: the NFL launched a full scale, 103-day investigation into this crimes against humanity.
With the Super Bowl on the horizon, the League had to do everything it could to protect the integrity of the sport’s biggest game. The NFL assured all of us that their balls would be under lock and key. I believe they called in the guys who protect Lord Stanley’s Cup to walk the game balls from the Pentagon to the University of Phoenix Stadium.
Before we get to Phoenix, let me get back to the importance of winning. If you’re not doing everything possible to be crowned victorious, I firmly believe you have no business playing. If that means a little bit of foul play? So be it.
Red Auerbach is perhaps the greatest cheater in professional sports history. Red drafted black players before it was allowed, he would intentionally dead areas of the Garden parquet in order to force turnovers, he’d break the showers and turn up the heat in the visiting locker room, and he’d blow cancerous smoke throughout arenas while his team was up 20 in the 4th quarter. The most astounding part of Auerbach’s cheating ways? He had the best player in the League on his team. Red really didn’t need to cheat with Bill Russell playing center. But he did, because fuck you and your team, that’s why. Red’s reward? 16 Championship banners. The Celtics have hung ONE banner without Red at the helm. Thank you, Red. You were a genius when it came to cheating and winning.
What proves Tom Brady is a fucking moron when it comes to cheating is this Super Bowl against the Seahawks. After losing to Peyton Manning in the 2007 AFC Championship Game, then to Eli Manning the following February to finish 18-1, then to Eli again a few seasons later before losing to Joe Flacco at home in yet another AFCCG, I can understand Brady turning to the dark side of the game in order to get back to the glory he felt in February of 2005. I just wish his cheating actually, yanno, worked.
Go back. Back to September of 2014. Read the articles. Dig up old interviews and podcasts. They wont be tough to find. Tom Brady was deemed a dead man walking during the 2014 season by all fans and analysts as he was skipping footballs like rocks across a pond four yards in front of his receivers. Brady wasn’t the player he once was and decided to plot and scheme his way to victory.
BUT THE ROCK SKIPPING DIDN’T STOP! Brady got better, sure. It probably had nothing to do with Rob Gronkowski getting healthy, but Tom’s accuracy wasn’t the same as it was in the past. He probably felt the deflated balls were giving him some huge advantage, which is why he kept doing it throughout the playoffs. And if that were true, I’d be all for it. I’d be sitting here writing about how much smarter Tom is than the rest of us. That his perfectly chiseled head contained a beautifully crafted mind not only functional for breaking down defenses, but also for PSI and spiral projection.
But it wasn’t the case. It wasn’t the case at all.
As we all agree upon, the Patriots were forced to use the NFL’s special, fully-inflated balls in the Super Bowl against the century’s best defense. How Vegas didn’t move the spread to SEA (-21) is beyond my realm of reasoning, but it appeared to the common fan that the Patriots were now screwed without having their magic footballs. That Tom Brady would be worse than the player Photoshop technicians put in a washing machine in September of 2014.
Instead, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr. threw 50 passes and completed 37 of them. (39 if you count the two he threw to the Seahawks.) While a 74% completion rate is decent, that isn’t the number we should be focusing on. It’s the 87% (13-for-15) Tom spun in the fourth quarter down 10 to the millennium’s best defense while hanging two touchdowns in the world’s grillmix that demands focus and questions.
Questions like: Why was Brady ever deflating footballs when he throws 74% on a half-hundred passes against the best defense on the biggest stage in football with fully inflated League approved footballs?
Was he trying to make the playing field *more* even, perhaps, due to the overall mediocrity of the League around him?
Did he decide after the 2007 regular season that the game of football was simply too easy for him, that he set up Kevin Faulk by planting dangerous marijuana on him at a Lil’ Wayne concert causing Bernard Pollard to tear his knee apart as to take a year vacation so the rest of the League could catch up?
Did Julian Edelman require a fully inflated football to be substituted into the game against the classy Ravens when he threw his touchdown to Danny Amendola or does he also prefer a deflated football for when he throws touchdowns?
Why would such a great quarterback handicap himself so greatly at such a cost to his organization.
We need the answers, Tom. And you will give them to us. Come hell or high water, you will pay for these crimes.
Mick's Tape 