Comments on: Football cheating goodness: Patriots in trouble

By: Evan

Evan — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:18:51 +0000

How is this against the rules. This is like when NASCAR punishes teams for modifying their cars in ways that don’t break the rules. The rules are clear (the car must fit the template), and the car doesn’t break the rules (it fits the template perfectly), but if the modification gives the team an advantage (which is why they did it) it gets them punished.

By: jlc

jlc — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:20:10 +0000

There’s a column in Time online (don’t know if it’s in the paper mag) that talks about the incident, then talks about how fans are perfectly happy to let their own team cheat.

Excerpt:

“Fans don’t really care how their teams win. They aren’t moral universalists; they don’t care about being fair to the other guys. In the abstract, fans oppose cheating. They may even oppose cheating by their own team, since the team could get caught, thus eliciting penalties that outweigh any potential gain. They may also fear the psychological penalties: if your team wins but people think it cheated, it’s harder to do a victory dance around the office watercooler. But fearing the consequences of cheating is a far cry from opposing it because it’s wrong. When the refs go to review a close play, fans don’t sit there thinking, I hope they’ll make the right call. They pray that the call goes their way. According to a 1999 study by psychologists at Murray State, a significant minority of fans–if guaranteed anonymity–would even support injuring an opposing player or coach. In 1940 the Cornell football team forfeited a victory after realizing that it had been mistakenly given an extra play. If a coach did that today, sports writers would declare him a saint. And his team’s fans would boil him in oil.”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1663863,00.html

By: bucdaddy

bucdaddy — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:38:07 +0000

I’m kind of missing how you can punish a team for this. For one thing, coaches stand there in the open all game, waggling signals 30-40 yards across the field for everyone to see. Presumably, everyone in the stands could focus on the assistants every game and figure out the signals. Presumably, everyone in the stands could have a camera phone.

For another, football is absolutely awash in video. Televised games (which is virtually all of them) offer 8, 10, 12, 20 different angles, and I’m sure the teams are taping themselves from several others. How can you tell a team it can’t put one of those cameras on the other team’s sideline? Football scouting is all about trying to figure out opponents’ tendencies. How is it unfair if a team figures out a coach’s signalling tendencies? Isn’t it up to the opponent to disguise signals well enough that they can’t be deciphered? (Baseball teams do this all the time. Catchers change signals when a runner’s on second base.)

I mean, it’s like saying a football coach can just yell across the field, “Hey, Bronko, blitz on this play,” and then punishing the other team for listening.

By: Mat

Mat — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:52:46 +0000

With as much money as there is in football, it seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to get that video without being detected. To me, the harder thing would be to keep ex-coaches/players from squealing, but I guess that’s not how it went down for the Patriots.

For baseball teams, it seems like it would be really, really easy to install a secret camera somewhere in the home dugout to tape the opposing managers so that some sign-stealing savant could study the film in the meantime. And you could probably do it without very many people within the organization really knowing about it, too.