Defate Gate: Oops!

"Your right hand should not know what your left hand is doing."

The NFL follows that rule really well.

Turns out the story the NFL released to the public yesterday was MISSING a key part of the story. It seems that the ball that the Kraft employee gave to a game official was GIVEN to him by another NFL employee who collects actual game balls for charity purposes.

Since one of the special K balls (kicking special teams) was misplaced in pregame, the NFL employee simply gave the Kraft locker room guy another ball and told him to use that one instead. That's what the Kraft employee did.

A side note: Bob Kraft is a billionaire who owns the Patriots, Kraft foods, and lots of other little companies. He freely assigns jobs to to some of those employees, as a reward, so they can see Patriot games up close. It's one of things that makes him such a popular boss. I guess many major league sports owners do the same thing. The employee from yesterday has had this game day job for about a decade.

Notice I haven't used ANY names in my articles about any of this. That's because, unlike all the other sports journalists, I don't want to give the impression that these little guys are guilty of anything. This employee was vilified in the sports media yesterday because everyone else finally thought they had the smoking gun. I refused to play that game. This guy's name was mentioned over and over nation-wide yesterday and his reputation was called into question. Me? I said the NFL was at fault, not this guy. I refused to play that game.

Once more I was right.


This case is no closer to closing than it ever was, and now an innocent man's name has been dragged through the dust for nothing. I hope he sues the league for millions. Isn't it about time that the NFL admit their procedures need more tweaking and call this a day? Even Mike and Mike are getting sick of this story. And they talked about it for a week straight after it happened.

One last thing. I'm hearing more and more how the Colts GM requested that the officials keep a closer watch on the balls because of an inflation issue in a previous game with the Patriots. My question is why they didn't share that information with the Patriots BEFORE HAND to let them know they are watching. It would make more sense to PREVENT this kind of thing from happening than catching them in the act. It's like they wanted to catch the Patriots doing something wrong when all they really supposedly wanted was a clean game.

Think about it. Which of these procedures would have given them the clean game they wanted?

As we all see, they clearly made the wrong choice.