here's a pats thread for everyone to talk about patritos shit because nobody else cares

arrington released, reiss hints he may be back. also fred davis signed on 1yr. haven't seen the deal yet but will be surprised if they can't cut him in preseason for free.

Michele Steele @ESPNMichele
Breaking: Grandy Jury indicts Aaron Hernandez for shooting Alexander Bradley, who allegedly witnessed double homicide

all of this is reminding me of when Cheney shot his hunting partner in the face

lol tru

oops!

Adam Schefter ✔@AdamSchefter
Filed to ESPN: Tom Brady suspended four games, Pats lose 1st round pick in 2016 and a 4th in 2017, and team fined $1 million, per source:

fun!

they going to appeal this? such bs imo
absurdly disproportionate (not convinced brady did anything wrong)

whole lot of locals on my twitter suddenly saying they care about how this punishment is unfair compared to the initial ray rice ruling (which is true, the proportions are fucked, NFL's a mess obviously) when there was not a peep to be heard from said locals when the ray rice shit was actually happening

definitely seems disproportionate. I think by now I've accepted that he probably did it but 4 games? that's only one less than Albert Haynesworth got for stomping on a guy's chest, and more than another player got recently for child endangerment.

I'd have been fine with it just being a fine and loss of draft pick for the team. and the Wells report stopped short of full confidence that Brady was implicated.

oh well, helps my team out....but not liking the precedent here. I'm fairly sure if the NFL looked closer for these smaller types of competitive cheats they could find it across the other 31 teams.

i am cool with it if it fuels some scowly brady v world march through the league and to another ring! wld be entertaining and good imo

what a bunch of BS, I hope they appeal

so probable footballs .5 psi under is way more detrimental to the league than any of the guys in domestic violence incidents

is this decision based off the public outrage about the whole #deflategate story - outrage that was generated by leaks from the NFL during the investigation?

sigh

it is inherently a steep punishment (the fine, a pick and maybe one game tops would be the most extreme i'd think of imo, they broke the rule but the rule is relatively minor) and even more when you compare it with rice, but goodell had to in order to make ppl forget for a little bit how long he's been in robert kraft's pocket

I have a Dolphin's fan friend who is mad the suspensions weren't further reaching and steeper and comparing this to Bountygate.

kinda understandable - the bountygate penalties were really steep especially considering how spurious a fair amount of the accusations levied against the saints ended up being

the penalty shd be the pats balls get over inflated all season, an eye for an eye

its too bad the pats didnt win the spygate superbowl wld be cooler if the benefited maximally from their evil deeds

also less emotionally traumatic for me

losing 33% of one's season over deflated balls kinda seems ridic. I mean did the ball deflation also prevent the Colts from playing pass defense ?

of course not the colts sucked

idk feel like its fine for the league to come down hard on cheating what are sports but rules after all makes u think

I think every holding penalty should result in the offender having to ride a little scooter in circles on the sideline for two minutes while the rest of the team plays down a man

just like hockey

lol seems reasonable

speaking as someone who isnt a pats fan really but can appreciate their talent/achievements, this whole thing didn't like offend my sensibilities or anything, it's more like...why bother, aren't you the goddamn patriots, you're one of the 3 or 4 best teams in the NFL, winning games is what y'all /do/

of course if the suspension was any longer or any shorter, then brady's first game back wouldn't be a sunday night game. against the colts. which is a little bit too, um, scripted.

(and i think while the investigation was completely silly, the punishment is fair enough considering everything, including brady's completely remorseless reaction.)

the league shd be giving the patriots an award for putting together one of the alltime great sports heals imho

like im not sure even the steinbrenner yankees were this cartoonishly malicious

should add a 'tom brady hands' unit to stat sheet for measuring total passing distance by a QB so that super cool QBs like me can laugh at tom's tiny hands

xp lol, they weren't at all! steinbrenner himself was bc he had private detectives try and dig up shit on people the team wasn't really aside from vintage era a-rod.

(among other classic george behaviors)

it's also why i've never been into the pats despite having parents from boston, being raised to cheer the other boston teams and living here now - not the heel aspect i dont dig so much as the slavish worship similar to what the yankees always got but hey different strokes/different folks

/scarface im the bad guy scene with bradys head on there or w/e/

if i had grown up here from jump would be in full homer anger mode i'm sure, i'm not above such things

xp lolllll

whereas the Stengel/Houk Yankees were famous for Whitey Ford discreetly doctoring the ball and Yogi Berra intentionally nicking it on his shinguards before throwing back to the pitcher.

and there was Mickey Mantle's "beaver shooting"

xxxpost

when i was a kid the pats were the worst franchise in the nfl so i basically have a successful republican small businessmans level of entitlement re their success

i made them with my futilely clapping sad childs hands no one helped me or believed in me

haha that's all the pats fans i know irl

xp

i totally understand that, i think one of the first super bowls i watched as a kid was packers-pats, the last parcells one, and i remember my mom talking about how much they usually sucked and how surprised she was by them even being there

shit is sad

the turn of how the fandom viewed them - from lovable scamps to unassailable saint-creatures - once they started winning was so much faster and so much of a harder skid than even the first two red sox titles, it was like WHOA.

yeah they were an after thought in the boston sports hierarchy

I want to draw a cartoon where Brady is doing his pre-game football routine where he is picking out the balls when suddenly he notices that they feel a little deflated. He jumps up, runs for the nearest ref crying "HALP HALP THESE BALLS ARE SQUISHY!! PLEASE REF, SAVE THE DAY FROM THESE SQUISHY BALLS".

okay maybe it wouldn't be that funny, but goddamn, even if Brady didn't know about teamsters and their needles, who the hell would report it?

the penalty seems to be about arrogance on both sides - how far it escalated without getting anyone to admit they did something, and therefore showing what happens if you don't cooperate 100% with the all powerful nfl.

watching closely how NE has operated over the past 10+ years, if kraft/belichick believe brady is also responsible, i'd expect they would do something - bench him, even. kraft cares way more about the brand of the pats organization than he does about any one player.

i wish the season was starting and there could just be football without all this drama

it's true we all diminished for this

eh I think that is true for everyone but touchdown tom if only bc brady is the root of everything, he is the ultimate belichick vanity reclamation project, the proof of his brilliance (and kraft's but less so) that validates those years where he was (in his mind of have to assume) an underappreciated assistant

(xp)

*i have to assume