Coach Bill Belichick made matters worse in his press conference this morning on the controversy over whether the Patriots cheated in last Sunday’s AFC championship game by using under-inflated footballs.
If you are advising someone in the coach’s shoes, there are two ways to handle this kind of situation. If there is an innocent explanation, you walk people through what it is and stay there until the last question has been asked. If there is no innocent explanation, you say as little as possible, try to confine the acceptable range of inquiry into as small a target as possible (namely, what you personally knew at the time of the alleged misbehavior, as opposed to what you have since learned), and stonewall the reporters – telling them to ask someone else and repeating that you’ve said all you are in a position to say.
Belichick’s approach was the latter, and he handled it poorly.
In particular, he made a few assertions I thought were incredible. I’ll just home in on one of them. After disclaiming any personal knowledge about the condition of the footballs before the game (in which the Pats trounced the Colts, 45-7), Belichick first sidestepped the obvious question about whether he has spoken with quarterback Tom Brady about the situation and then insisted that he (Belichick) still has “no explanation” for what happened to the balls.
How can that possibly be true? It may be that Belichick has no innocent explanation. It may be that he had no personal participation in what happened. But there is no way he hasn’t met with Brady and gotten to the bottom of what happened (i.e., how Brady and the equipment manager prepared and handled the balls before and during the game).
Put aside that Belichick is a notoriously detail-oriented guy. He has another game to coach! And it will be a game in which the condition of the footballs will be scrutinized as never before. Let’s assume that the coach is telling the truth about having no foreknowledge. He still has overwhelming incentive to know how the balls were handled: (a) he now has to make sure different procedures are used before the Super Bowl; (b) he has to know whether Brady did something that might warrant a suspension, in which case Belichick would have to plan for his star quarterback’s absence; and (c) this incident could have a deep impact on his legacy – we’re talking about a great coach who is regarded by some as the greatest in the history of the game.
So I simply do not believe Belichick, as he stood before the press this morning, was not in a position to explain what happened – at least from the standpoint of someone who has looked into it and was in the best position of anyone to get answers from those who were involved. In fact, the first thing he said at the press conference was that he’d learned more over the last three days about the process of handling the footballs than he’d learned in the preceding 40 years. How could he have educated himself about the process but not about how the process worked last Sunday – the only thing that matters?
It’s unfortunate that reporters keep describing this scandal as being about “deflated” balls. That assumes a fact not in evidence. It is conceivable – and this would seem to be the best-case scenario for the Pats – that Brady selected balls that were (perhaps inadvertently) under-inflated and that the Pats’ equipment guy presented those balls to the refs; the refs approved them for use in the game without examining them carefully enough; and only after the game began did it become clear that the balls were under-inflated. In that scheme of things, the balls were never “deflated.” The Pats (characteristically) would be found to have played fast and loose with the rules, but the main culprits would be the refs for doing a shoddy job checking the balls.
The much worse case scenario is that the Pats presented balls that were inflated sufficiently (or perhaps slightly less); the refs approved them; and then someone associated with the Pats (the equipment manager? the ball boy? a player or coach? Brady himself?) took some action to deflate them so Brady could get a better grip.
If it’s the second scenario, suspensions (for starters) are in order. In baseball, a pitcher who doctored the ball would be thrown out of the game if caught during it, and suspended for one or more future games.
Tom Brady will be speaking to the media at 4pm 3:45 p.m., so we’ll learn more then. But I’m betting that whatever the explanation is, Bill Belichick knows it at this point … and chose not to reveal it this morning. He was under no legal obligation to reveal what he knows — this is not a trial, he’s not under oath. But the point of this exercise was PR. If you’re not going to say something helpful, better to say nothing. And it’s always a mistake to say something implausible.
UPDATE: The Patriots have moved Tom Brady’s press conference up to 3:45 p.m. It was originally supposed to be Friday. The Pats first moved it up to 4 p.m. this afternoon, and now it is to be 15 minutes earlier. Obviously, the team is anxious to try to put the story behind them and focus on the upcoming Super Bowl — they certainly do not want it lingering when they arrive in Arizona early next week, where thousands of reporters will be in a frenzy. Of course, to put the story behind them, they need to explain what happened in a manner that satisfies people that all the questions have been answered. On that score, Coach Belichick did not help.