5 Reasons You Should Keep Paying Attention to Deflategate

Oh no, not another Deflategate column.

Just the presence of the word “Deflategate” in the headline may have given you the urge to throw your smartphone against the wall in disgust—or at least sent you scrolling hurriedly away to read some nice, safe NBA article. You reached your saturation level for distillations of the contents of 61-page briefs to circuit courts, dissertations by Ph.D. physicists on science basics and comment-thread turf wars between the Free Brady and Cheatriots gangs long ago.          

And yet you clicked this article and are still reading. For that, I thank you.

After a never-ending series of legal and public opinion twists and turns that threatens to last longer than an elephant pregnancy, Deflategate no longer has anything to say to you. Or so you think. In fact, Deflategate is more than just an ear-splitting car alarm right outside your window that never shuts off. The controversy can still inform, or at least entertain, if you approach it the right way.

There are plenty of wrong ways to approach Deflategate. Don’t wade into the controversy expecting to:

• Determine Tom Brady’s guilt or innocence. You already made your mind up one way or the other. The legal battles of Deflategate began on a frontier far from the question of whether Brady ever ordered any underlings to deflate footballs and have been moving toward a vanishing point of procedural hair-splitting ever since. Wednesday’s “major development,” reported by Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, was a friend-of-the-court brief by professional arbiter Kenneth Feinberg that was essentially about the profession of arbitrating. Deflategate exists in a legal gravity well from which clear thought and money cannot escape.

• Learn something about science. If you want to learn about the ideal gas law, consult a seventh-grade science textbook. Deflategate science is all about academics overcomplicating middle school physics—it’s like listening to chefs from Le Cordon Bleu explain toast—to make Patriots fans feel extra righteous while the real legal debates center around cellphone records, investigative procedures and the commissioner’s legal and collectively bargained right to make stupid decisions.

• Determine who will win the AFC East. The Patriots will win, even with Jimmy Garoppolo running the offense for four games. Who is going to stop them, Christian Hackenberg?

• Determine Brady’s legacy. We should be more worried about our legacy as the generation that allowed this to happen.

Venture into Deflategate looking for big answers on the right-wrong, innocence-guilt or temperature-pressure fronts, and you will only leave disappointed and confused.

But here are five reasons Deflategate does still matter. Come at the controversy from the proper angle, and you will at least find it more amusing, if not necessarily fulfilling.

 

5. Deflategate is America’s greatest source of ironic cultural metacommentary

The longer the legal battle wages, the more Deflategate looks like a postmodern deconstruction of runaway bureaucracy instead of sports news. It’s like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or some dense David Foster Wallace metafiction. But it’s 100 percent real, which gives it a horrifying, compelling beauty, like watching time-lapse photography of buzzards picking at a carcass.

The trick to appreciating Deflategate at this level is to stop thinking of Roger Goodell, Brady and the other participants as real, living humans—you probably have not thought of Goodell as human in years—and imagine them instead as characters in a tale of feudal …

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