The Instant Historian: Super Bowl Media Lull Loves Tom Brady's Balls
By Ty Duffy
This is a column. It was conceived by the author. It has a snooty title. It will appear more or less weekly. It will, hopefully, prevent his career imploding in an apoplectic Twitter meltdown. Send all unabashed praise to tyduffy at gmail dot com.
The Super Bowl lull is the least wonderful time of the year. Media coverage intensifies. Content, with one football game over two weeks, dries up. Throw in a bottle of social media accelerant. Nonsense becomes inevitable.
Last year’s fortnight yielded edifying explorations of Richard Sherman’s PR stunt and Marshawn Lynch’s muteness. This year, we have Tom Brady’s balls. Or, let us not be remiss, #DEFLATEGATE. A few thoughts…
Stop adding “gate.” Gate is a noun. In rare, passive voice cases, it can be a verb. It’s not a suffix. Adding “gate” makes no grammatical sense. Watergate was the name of the hotel *complex. Letting that bit of incorrectness slide, “gate” deployment remains unoriginal. Countless individuals, who write words for a living, have resorted to this convention for 40 years. The banality has outlived popular knowledge of the initial scandal. Just in the NFL, we’ve had “Spygate,” “Bountygate” and, we suspect, a few more our memory mercifully omits.
“Gate” distorts perceptions. It primes the reader/viewer/listener for conspiracy, scandal and grave import. #DEFLATEGATE trended. It entered a mutual feedback loop between media and audience, shedding nuance at every turn. It was the nation’s No. 1 news story, before there was clear evidence of wrongdoing.
By Thursday, #DEFLATEGATE was the lead story on every major news network. Non sports fans were roused. Earnest Twitter users were arguing draft picks and fines weren’t enough of a deterrent. A Today Show poll indicated that 81 percent of viewers thought the Patriots should be banned from the Super Bowl. That lunacy is on the media coverage.
Start adding context. Journalism’s raison d’être is to educate the public. That’s not just disseminating the latest updated information. That’s offering a cogent contextual framework to process said information. For all the breathless, wall-to-wall reporting on, discussion of and moralizing about #DEFLATEGATE, basic questions remain unanswered.
How prevalent is deflating footballs in the NFL? Is this viewed as all caps CHEATING or is it more akin to every MLB pitcher using pine tar during frigid October night games? This Charles Robinson article from 2013 suggests ball deflation was SOP throughout college football. We can presume some NFL teams are doing it. How many? How often?
How much of an advantage does having an 85-percent inflated ball provide. Is this a superficial quarterback comfort thing? Or, does it affect the outcome of Patriots football games? Are there conditions, i.e. cold weather, where it provides an added advantage? Little knowledge has emerged amidst the finger-wagging.
All cheating may be cheating, in black and white sports columnist land. But, that’s like saying all crime is crime. Common sense informs us modest speeding differs from running a prostitution ring. Laws, like rules, are determined as much by custom and enforcement as presence in a statute. Few would term a Michigan man seducing an unmarried woman a “criminal.”
This is why context is vital. We don’t know whether the advantage gained by modest ball deflation is significant. We don’t know whether this is a rule the NFL enforces. That’s before we get to the weird details and the small matter of proof of wrongdoing beyond supposition. Those questions are hard. Which is why the media cycle eschewed them, going straight from zero to what will the children, think, Tom?
Consumers of media have not been informed. They have been set up for all caps OUTRAGE against the league’s pantomime villains, because the ignorant and outraged are more apt to stay tuned or click. It’s 2015. The ship is going down. But, perhaps we could aspire to a bit more before we hit bottom.
On Headline Accuracy… Alabama Crimson Tide linebacker Ryan Anderson was arrested on a domestic violence charge. That headline, or some similar variation, appeared in multiple outlets. That headline was followed by the mugshot image. If you happened to drift down to the text, here is a description of what happened.
"Ryan Anderson is accused of kicking a woman’s vehicle during an argument at an off-campus residence late Monday night, Tuscaloosa Police spokesman Sgt. Brent Blankley stated in a written release. The woman had keyed and thrown coins at Anderson’s vehicle, Blankley said. TPD officers were called to the residence in the 1300 block of 17th Avenue East at 11:28 p.m., according to the release. They noted damage to both vehicles and found probable cause to charge Anderson and Sierra Patterson, both 20, with third-degree domestic violence/criminal mischief. The domestic violence charge indicates that the two are, or were, involved in a dating relationship."
While “Anderson” technically was charged with “domestic violence,” it was a misdemeanor charge, the “violence” was performed on an inanimate object, and he was not the only party arrested (or, judging from the report, the aggressor in this situation). The headline is technically correct, but it will also induce just about everyone googling his name and not clicking through to the fine print to believe he is violent toward women, like one of his just enrolled teammates, allegedly.
On Tomsula… The San Francisco 49ers ran Jim Harbaugh out of the building, after characteristic, almost unprecedented success in his first four years in the NFL. They promoted defensive line coach Jim Tomsula to replace him. Tomsula came with the requisite “NFL sources see him as a future head coach” endorsement. But, his initial one-on-one interview went about as poorly as one could project. Then, the presumed advantage of promoting from within, staff continuity, was shot, as defensive coordinator Vic Fangio left for the Chicago Bears. The Instant Historian can assure you we’ll all be laughing about these early, inauspicious days after the third Super Bowl of the Tomsula era.