Super Bowl XLIX is fast approaching, with the annual event taking place on Sunday, February 1, and pitting the defending NFL champion Seattle Seahawks against the mostly-dominant New England Patriots.
Super Bowl XLIX is fast approaching, with the annual event taking place on Sunday, February 1, and pitting the defending NFL champion Seattle Seahawks against the mostly-dominant New England Patriots. But in the run-up to the Super Bowl and in the aftermath of the Pats’ AFC Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts, the team has had to deal with an issue known as “DeflateGate,” where New England has been accused of cheating by having 11 of its 12 footballs under-inflated during the Colts game.
Opinion pieces on the DeflateGate debacle vary in their tone. Some have accused Patriots coach Bill Belichick of being a cheater – a “Belicheat,” as they would say. Such controversy, after all, isn’t anything new to the veteran coach, who was fined in 2007 for another “-gate” issue, the “Spygate” controversy.
As a reminder, that was when Belichick was accused of taping the rival New York Jets’ defensive signals, and that had resulted in the Patriots getting levied fines worth $750,000. And despite his in-depth explanation of how the offending under-inflated footballs don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, there are some who still don’t believe him, and still a lot of negative editorials about Belichick and the Patriots.
The latest chapter in the saga, as we now know, is a report from Jay Glazer of Fox Sports that claims a Patriots locker room attendant had transferred some footballs from the officials’ locker room to different part of the stadium. Still, it may all be much ado about nothing, with the Pats gearing up for Super Bowl XLIX.
In an op-ed for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Bill Livingston wrote this week that the DeflateGate flap may not be worth getting worked up about, considering how the Patriots had dominated the Colts in both their meetings this season, and won their last four meetings by convincing margins. But at the end of the day, he also acknowledged that the bigger DeflateGate question should be “why,” as the Patriots wouldn’t have needed to pull such shenanigans considering their success against the Colts.