[T]hat Belichick would be so brazen as to send a camera guy over to the Jets sideline to openly break the rules. If true, that's just a ballsy, glorious, tragically flawed move.
This is what I love about sports in general, and the NFL in particular: it's a man's version of a soap opera that runs for about 25 weeks each year.
Like a soap opera, it's mostly meaningless and yet sometimes irresistable, always filled with all sorts of improbable twists, reversals and surprises.
Already, with the season less than six days old, we've one player facing possible lifetime paralysis (but now who miraculously may walk again, prayers out to him), we have the ongoing real-time circus that is Chad Johnson, we have the Brady Quinn affair in Cleveland, which includes a QB who started for one team three days ago but was traded just yesterday.
And now, we have this: Videotape-gate.
All around us, the world is falling apart, wars are raging, global warming is rearranging the deck chairs in our titanic environment, and all they can talk about on a dozen TV networks, a hundred other radio talk shows, and countless blogs -- like this one -- is whether or not the Patriots cheated against the Jets last Sunday.
At this point, I'm leaning toward this blast in response: "Who cares?"
It's all entertainment anyway.
I'm still not unconvinced that the outcomes of these things that pass for games aren't scripted to some degree, beginning with way the league schedule is created.
Yesterday was the sad anniversary of 9/11/2001, and that season, who won the Super Bowl, at a time when the country was trying to heal and regain so-called normalcy?
The Patriots!
Now isn't that patriotic, you wartime consigliere, and just a little too perfect?
That the Patriots got to the big game that year was fishy, just ask the Oakland Raiders about the tuck rule.
Sport's is all about selling tickets and merch and overpriced satellite TV packages, right?
If you were writing a story that you wanted people to buy, you'd have to create heroes and villians.
That's exactly what's going on here: Belichick is being painted as a villian.
But is any of this real?
And who is to be the hero in this season's screenplay?
Wouldn't we all feel like fools if we found out that we've been watching an elaborate charade for years?
How the NFL rules on this alleged cheating will tell me a lot about whether this is real or play-acting: if the League forfeits the Patriots' win, then it's real enough; anything else leaves open the door for skeptics.