"Kraft’s remarkable successes with both the Patriots and with his industrial businesses have given him tremendous sway both with other NFL owners and with league executives. In just the past few years his profile in the league has risen markedly. He serves on the NFL owners’ executive committee and four other committees, more than any other owner. As co-chair of the league’s powerful broadcasting committee, he takes an active role in negotiating the lucrative contracts that allow CBS, Fox, Comcast, ABC, and ESPN to televise NFL games. In 2006, Kraft’s support for Roger Goodell was influential in getting the new commissioner selected."
Now im not going full blown conspiracy on this, but ask yourself how many times youve said while watching a patriots game "ive never seen a luckier team" or "how do they get so lucky"? Ive said it tons of times...but if you take into consideration how powerful kraft is in the league it makes sense. The pats get favored heavily by refs all the time. It also just so happens that kraft was pivotal in getting Goodell hired and goodell and kraft are buddy buddy. This ball deflating thing no matter how big or small of an issue it is its still breaking the rules and will most likely be swept under the rug and the fall guy ball boy will have acted alone and noone of any value to the patriots knew about it.
Not this stuff again. Don't conclude your remarkss with "now I'm not going full blown conspiracy on this" when in fact your whole purpose was to flog a conspiracy theory. You've remained true to every archetypal conspiracy theorist known to mankind. You cut and paste an extract from a five-year old article that says absolutely nothing other than Kraft is a valuable man to the NFL and from that inane observation conclude from it that the league protects him and his team. This is banality cubed. You just let an accusation hang there with no evidence, consider no other possibilities and just let a set of random facts be associated with a nefarious supposition of your own making. You even go so far as to imagine the Patriots get preferential treatment from the officials. Kraft is influential ergo the league protects him and coddles him to the detriment of the other 31 owners, many of them quite influential in the league. Listen to Redskins' fans talk about the Maras and how they got Goodell to punish the Redskins severely for violating the salary cap a few years ago. This crap is 90% about envy, ego and the inability of fans to deal with losing. It's the insatiable need to belittle accomplishments their team is incapable of attaining.
And it gets really sickening when fans try to couch this stuff in hyperbole about protecting the "integrity of the game" as if that's really what it's about. They talk about Spygate for instance without really understanding what exactly the Patriots were accused of doing and how it wasn't even against the rules until September 2006. They talk about debunked nonsense like the taping of walk-throughs before the Super Bowl as if it was an unquestioned fact and not the fabrication it turned out to be, leading the Boston Herald to retract the story and place an apology in the paper not once, but twice, something newspapers are loath to do fearing it will undermine their journalistic credibility. If it's not about the Patriots and it's really about the integrity of the game how come when Jimmy Johnson goes on Fox Sports and admits being taught how to do it by a Chiefs' scout 20-years ago and actively doing it himself with the Cowboys, no one cares? When Cowher goes on 96.7 in Pittsburgh and says the Steelers did it no one cares? When the Jets and Broncos get caught doing it, no one cares? When 6 or 7 NFL teams are under investigation by the DEA for the illegal prescription of painkillers, the most prevalent form of PED in the league, it doesn't even register as cheating, because no one associates a low pain tolerance as a physical limitation like being slow or weak that needs to be overcome.
You want to talk about the integrity of the game when guys like Lawrence Taylor admit to doing copious amounts of cocaine, one of the greatest stimulants modern chemistry has ever devised, at halftime during the Super Bowl? Is anyone familiar with Hollywood Henderson's mea culpa about sticking a small spray bottle in his pants containing a cocaine/water solution and spraying it in his mouth between plays during the second Cowboys/Steelers Super Bowl? Where is the outrage if this hand-wringing is about preserving the integrity of the game? And even if your defense is everyone was on roids and coke in the 70s and 80s or it didn't violate a specific rule at the time, all of which is true, it only feeds into the double-standard that is applied to the Pats. Since Deflate-gate we've since been informed that there must have been systematic underinflation going back years since starting in 2007 the Pats' rate of fumbling has decreased from being one of the worst in the league at home to one of the best. Well obviously it must be underinflated balls, it can't be that the Pats replaced the personnel that were fumbling the ball so damn much before then! And no one questions why the conspiracy theorists pick 2007 as a cut off point for statistical purposes or what that even means really (obviously they picked 2007 because that's when Spygate broke and once the spotlight was on that, the Pats had to go to some other form of cheating.)
This is all conspiracy theorizing of the most ridiculous sort, but it's par for the course. Even if they're exonerated they're not really exonerated. You can't prove a negative, and anything exculpatory just becomes further fuel for the conspiracy theorist, a lack of real evidence is just further proof to the conspiracy guys that something grander is at play, some dark lord of the Sith standing behind the curtain manipulating the process. Goodell suppresses the evidence because he's Kraft's buddy. Pats fans think Goodell persecutes them because he used to work for the Jets, it's all thinking of the same ilk and Dolphins fans just look the part of a rabble that hasn't won anything in so long it's made us lose all perspective.