@Randem

While baseball bears the moniker of “America’s pass time”, basketball has always had its loyal fans, and NASCAR seems to resonate well with the toothless gitterdones, I have always held the NFL as truly being America’s sport.

Just think about the difference. New Yorkers and Bostonians make a lot of noise when the Yankees play the Red Sox (and somehow this phenomenon manages to suck in all manner of outside interest). There is no city in the world where you can’t find a Chicago Cubs hat. All of Hollywood’s elite compete for court-side seats at Lakers games. But for four months out of the year, the entire world stops on Sunday while we all tune in to see our favorite teams and players.

While big market baseball teams (read The Yankees) spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in order to steal the talented players from everywhere else, and buy a championship, as they say, teams in the NFL have had to make teamwork and coaching matter under a tight salary cap.

While the average hockey team is predominantly Canadian and European, and while the average baseball team is predominantly Dominican and South American, you still find that most players in the NFL are American — black, white, hispanic, or asian, there is no racial bias, but there is a bias toward being American.

While Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds use steroids to rewrite the record books, and while the NBA’s definition of traveling keeps bending to allow superstars to take five steps and slam dunk without a whistle, the NFL works each year to tighten the penalties and to stop teams from cheating.

And that topic, cheating, is what really pisses me off about spygate. It was cheating. Hardcore, in-your-face, no nonsense, no excuses… it was cheating.

Worse, the team that did it just happens to be the team that everyone has been calling the latest dynasty. The pundits have all praised the Patriots for being the first team to figure out how to win consistently since the salary cap was imposed. Little did they know that they were praising a team for figuring out how to cheat.

League commissioner Roger Goodell handed down his (weak) punishment before he ever got his hands on the tapes. But worse still, he learned that Congress wanted to see the tapes and knowing this, he had them destroyed. Come on, folks… you’ve seen Sopranos, you know how this works. I sure miss Paul Tagliabue.

What a dumb move. Really. But I thank the powers that be for the tenacity of Senator Arlen Specter who, as ESPN.com points out, isn’t buying it:

Specter heard that explanation from Goodell on Wednesday. On Thursday, Specter said, “The word absurd and ridiculous keep coming to my mind, because he [Goodell] says it with a straight face.”

Specter said it was unsettling to learn that the tapes, as well as notes, turned over by the Patriots in September had been destroyed in Foxboro rather than in the league’s New York offices. Aiello said the documents and tapes were destroyed after they were reviewed by NFL officials Jeffrey Pash and Ray Anderson, and that the call to destroy the material came from Goodell, saying “There’s no further use for it, so he said get rid of it.”

Specter said the league’s suggestion that the material, particularly the notes dating to the 2002 season, was destroyed because it might have afforded a competitive advantage is unbelievable.

“Everything has changed,” he said. “Nobody could use those. They are scrap paper — except evidence.”

What we really need here is a whistle-blower — someone who was a member of the Patriots organization, and who knows the extent of the cheating and what advantage it provided, and who would come out and tell the world the truth in order to salvage the integrity of the sport. Unfortunately, that will never happen. Anybody who did that would never work in professional sports ever again, and that’s too much to lose for anyone who’s worked to get to this level.

I hope Senator Specter gets to the bottom of this and delivers a huge slap in the face to Roger Goodell and the NFL and to the Patriots organization for the shame they’ve brought upon the one team sport that I always felt was above the rest.