Forfeiting the games would have a shitty effect for the rest of the league, though, essentially giving four teams a free win an one less game played each.
The most egregious part of this is not the actual deflating of the balls. It's Robert Kraft demanding an apology from the league before the investigation, it's the fact that nobody from the Cheatriots questioned Ted Wells' ability to perform an independent investigation until after the report came out and they didn't like the results. It's the fact that they still maintain this air of integrity after they've been shown to have a clear culture of cheating.
They earned the Super Bowl. They won that game fair and square. You fuck over a lot of fans if you cancel the Super Bowl or just declare no winner. I don't think it was the first time they used deflated balls, and I don't know how many games were affected by it. But there's no way to prove that. If the AFC championship weren't an absolute blowout, an argument could have been made that the Colts should have gone to the Super Bowl. But those deflated balls didn't cause the Colts to score only 7 points. And they didn't allow Tom and the Cheatriots offense to score 45 points, 28 in the second half with normally inflated balls.
I think the fines were enough. It's more than almost any other fine the league has ever handed down. Losing a first round pick is massive. Losing a whole year's draft would be excessive.
The most egregious part of this is not the actual deflating of the balls. It's Robert Kraft demanding an apology from the league before the investigation, it's the fact that nobody from the Cheatriots questioned Ted Wells' ability to perform an independent investigation until after the report came out and they didn't like the results. It's the fact that they still maintain this air of integrity after they've been shown to have a clear culture of cheating.
They earned the Super Bowl. They won that game fair and square. You fuck over a lot of fans if you cancel the Super Bowl or just declare no winner. I don't think it was the first time they used deflated balls, and I don't know how many games were affected by it. But there's no way to prove that. If the AFC championship weren't an absolute blowout, an argument could have been made that the Colts should have gone to the Super Bowl. But those deflated balls didn't cause the Colts to score only 7 points. And they didn't allow Tom and the Cheatriots offense to score 45 points, 28 in the second half with normally inflated balls.
I think the fines were enough. It's more than almost any other fine the league has ever handed down. Losing a first round pick is massive. Losing a whole year's draft would be excessive.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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