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It's a gray area
September 12, 2007Apparently the old NASCAR adage, "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying" rumbled its way off a race track somewhere and parked squarely in the New England Patriots locker room.
Pats coach Bill Belichick gave the standard "I can't comment on that right now" in Wednesday's press conference, but it's pretty clear that the organization got caught with its hand in the cookie jar.
While NFL commissioner Roger Goodell -- who's coming off a lot like Judge Roy Bean recently --considers whether or not to punish the Pats by taking future draft picks, he should make things simple and just take away their now tainted 38-14 win over the New York Jets last Sunday.
Goodell is all about sending messages, and if the allegations levied against them thus far are true, the Patriots are in desperate need of one.
There's already rumbling about asterisks on Super Bowl victories and whatnot, but that'll never fly.
Just like no one can definitively say when steroids began in baseball, it's going to be just as difficult to ascertain when the Pats' Coach Cam opened for business.
However, a stiff current penalty in lieu of a future one would send a much clearer message to a league that was even dirtier than previously thought.
Posted by Stephen Smith at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
