This is all true, but you realize you are drawing conclusions based on circumstantial evidence that itself proves nothing, right? I can do the same thing: There's no denying the league took the extraordinary step of burying the evidence, and there's no conceivable purpose for doing so if it was benign and exculpatory. That's not a Jets fan being a sore loser. Just the facts.
I don't know that it would truly be considered "circumstantial" evidence though. Keep in mind, what's in question here would be how much of a factor it was in the team's success. If you have a scientific theory, you would devise a series of tests representative of vetting out said theory. The results - or the "data" from those tests - would lead you to a conclusion. So if someone said, "The Patriots won three Super Bowls because of Spygate," at this point, it would be harder to substantiate that theory due to the team's continued success. I'm an ordinary guy, I don't claim to be anyone's moral compass. But as a sports fan, I would have a very hard time rooting for a team that I believed to be flawed or dishonest or lazy. It's the very reason I absolutely detest the 2012 version of the Red Sox despite being a fan for nearly 40 years. I can't root for them, and don't want them to do well. In a similar way, if the Patriots became a perennial .500 team after Spygate, I'd have been the first villager in line, holding my torch and ready to burn down the tower. That's all I'm really trying to say.
Oh Scruggy, you card you... You're just jealous because even if the Jets did the same thing they would have screwed it up somehow. Some camera guy would have accidentally taped over the footage with "Different Strokes" reruns or forgotten to buy extra batteries. :wink:
It's purely circumstantial. What someone does after a crime is committed may cast suspicion on them, may explain their motives, may allow you to draw all kinds of inferences, but it positively does not prove they committed that crime or not. If the Patriots became a perennial 500 team after spygate it wouldn't prove anything either. And I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right. But your conclusion is based more on the fact that you're a Pats homer than you think. No Jets fan will give you any kind of grief for rooting for a flawed team.
selective memory perhaps? in 2006 playoff game Jets vs Patriots a jet camera crew was stopped from filming in the end zone ,,Jets crews were already filming from sidelines in designated area.. patriot security confronted the jets camera crew and made them stop filming from the area not designated.The Patriots did not confiscate the film or report the incident to nfl security.. when asked about the incident after the game coach Mangini stated he wanted to have game footage from the endzone... so what if BB had actually turned Mangini in? this incident took place the year prior to Spygate issue.. would it be safe to say stealing signals was a common practice? as one former coach point out its nice but just as easy to bring in someone a team cuts and ask them what the signals are? Goodell did the Pats no favors by destroying tapes ,just leads conspiracy theorists to draw conclusions with no facts as base
No one is arguing that the Patriots "did not commit the crime". The Patriots admitted to violated a league rule. GoPats is saying that the Patriots' offensive production did not decline following the team being caught and punished for taking videotapes of opponents' defensive signals, in a way that was not in a accordance with the rules. There is nothing circumstantial about that argument. It is a completely factual statement that can be substantiated in a number of ways. When you go on to say that it proves the Patriots did not benefit from those illegal tapes, then it becomes somewhat circumstantial because you are using inferences to arrive at that conclusion. However, that still doesn't make it a "homer" argument or in any way unreasonable. If you wanted to test whether a workout supplement is effective or not, how would you go about finding the answer? Most of us would take the supplement, workout, analyze the results, and compare them to past results where we were not using the supplement. Both examples can be distorted by confounding variables, but that doesn't make either one wrong or baseless.
