Saturday, May 16, 2015

Tom Brady's Balls

First off, let me say hello to those of you who ended up here via a Google search looking for something entirely different.  I apologize for the confusion and wish you luck in your quest for certain photos.  Might I suggest using image search to help speed up results.*

*Probably not a great idea if you're at work however...

For those who haven't been paying attention to the story by virtue of not being American or having standards in what you consider 'newsworthy', the US has currently been embroiled in something that the media insists on calling 'Deflategate'*.

*They call it this because people are inherently stupid and seem Hell bent on believing that 'gate' is a suffix meaning 'Scandal' as opposed to just being part of the name of a hotel. I've already gone on about it at some length here, if you're at all interested.

The basic upshot of this particular scandal is this -

American Football (which can be loosely described as playing rugby while dressed as a robot) has a regular season of seventeen weeks during which each team plays sixteen games.*

*Each team is allotted one week out of those seventeen to not play. They call this a 'bye' week for reasons I don't understand and can't be bothered to Google.

After the end of the regular season the league picks the teams that had the best records in their respective divisions, two other teams referred to as 'wild cards' and one team that doesn't stand a chance in Hell but everybody feels sorry for, and those teams play a series of postseason games to determine which two teams will play the Superbowl*

*A sporting event notable for the fact that the vast percentage of people watching it on television are only doing do to see the commercials, Janet Jackson's nipple, or both**

**Ms. Jackson's*** right nipple is currently a spokesnipple for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Their ads are surprisingly tasteful.

*** Because I'm nasty.

Now, relevant to this story - the franchise team out of Boston is called The New England Patriots. I don't know why they identify themselves as being from New England instead of Boston, but I assume that it's to distance themselves from the accent.  Like any group referring to themselves as 'Patriots', they spend the vast bulk of their time attempting to be as large a bag of dicks as they possibly can. (more on that phenomena here... but be aware, I accidentally spoil the end of Goldfinger somewhere around the last paragraph)   

The Quarterback for the NEP is a man named Tom Brady. (For the foreign among you - the Quarterback is the one in the middle with the good hair.) And according to information that came to light after the fact, he apparently had one of the equipment boys adjust his balls before this year's championship game.

<I'm going to take a moment to savor that last sentence>

More specifically, (and less like a twelve year old) he had someone take all of the game footballs into a quiet room and let a bunch of air out of them because that apparently make them easier to catch. The Patriots went on to win that game, and then to win the Superbowl the following week, and then back to their regular schedule of Narcissism and dutch ruddering*. Eventually a commission looked into the whole thing and released a statement that while they were pretty sure he had tampered with the footballs they were absolutely certain that he was kind of a prick, and so they suspended him for four games, fined the team a bit of money, and went back to their regular schedule of resolutely ignoring spousal abuse.

*definitely turn off the image search before looking that one up.

I hope that this has explained the situation.