I would have to argue with two of your points bud.
#1 The rules changing is not cheating. I agree that it means we can't always compare players from one era to players from another, but cheating is playing outside the rules. The rules changing is one thing, but players still have to play within those rules.. thats why we have rules.
#2 I hear people saying that the deflated balls didn't affect the game. My question then is... why did he do it? Why would someone break the rules if it had no affect. He had secret text messages about the subject. He had people sneaking into equipment rooms after balls had been inspected to change the air pressure. Why?
I think it's wrong to assume it had no affect on the game. It's kind of like when Pudge Rodriguez was called out for using 'roids. He got off them. He lost a lot of muscle. He had some of the best seasons of his career.
People will argue they had no affect on him. They did have an affect. He didn't need them to be a great player, but they still had an affect.
Brady may not have needed deflated balls to win a Superbowl, but he obviously went through all that trouble for a reason.... because it had an impact.
Fair points. That said:
1) Rules are not black and white, that's exactly why we have refs and replays to figure them out (and why we can still say they got it wrong). Rules are subjective themselves.
Further, rules are simply what is agree upon in public. Everybody knows that each down played has a hold or two going on in the trenches. By the letter of the rule, we should be seeing constant penalties. But nobody wants to see that or play that way. The refs, the players, and the league have all agreed in private to simply not be that strict. This basically requires players to cheat (by the letter of the rule) to play effectively - but no one considers it cheating because they accept it's good for the game.
Taking that one further to Barry, what seems to have been agreed upon in private is that steroids and HGH were ok to use. The league actively looked the other way, use was prevalent all over, and the public loved seeing those dingers (our revisionist history of this era is actually kind of sad to me). Now, did Barry break the rules? Absolutely, no one should argue otherwise. But did he have an unfair advantage (the basic premise for having rules)? Hard to say. Like Pudge, Barry was great either way. Could he have hit 73 homers without juice? I don't know. But he would have been just as much better than his peers in an unjuiced world.
2) Playoff football has a binary outcome: win or lose. We can talk about how well a team played or didn't, but those two conditions are the only ones that matter at the end of the day. When I say the deflated balls didn't affect the game, I mean that New England was too much better than the Colts to lose regardless.
As for why he did it, because he wanted every advantage. He's human, he's not walking into the game thinking, "Well, obviously we are going to smoke them, so I don't need to try very hard." Brady and the team are giving maximum effort because the playoffs demand as much. And maximum effort includes taking chances to improve the odds.
Consider sign-stealing in the NFL. It is against the rules, certainly. But if a coach notices the same signs across the field leading to the same plays, we would consider them stupid if they didn't adjust. Indeed, there's a reason coaches cover their mouths when calling a play, and why three different players are throwing fake signs every time a they read the play from the sidelines. And again, if our team isn't at least trying to crack the code during the game, we would consider them remiss in their duties. Why is that, when we know it's cheating?
Deflating footballs FEELS more like cheating than stealing signs during the game. That's why we care more. We ignore the fact that teams have people on staff that do nothing during the game but watch opponents' signals because it doesn't feel so bad. Then we are up in arms when even close to the same effort is put towards cheating in another way. But in a black and white world, where cheating is cheating, they are both the same. That Brady deflated balls is against the rules, but that he tried to give his team (or even just himself) an extra edge is basic football.
