Quote
stlramz
SECTION 2 EXTRAORDINARILY UNFAIR ACTS
ARTICLE 1. COMMISSIONER AUTHORITY. The Commissioner has the sole authority to investigate and take appropriate
disciplinary and/or corrective measures if any club action, non-participant interference, or calamity occurs in an NFL game
which he deems so extraordinarily unfair or outside the accepted tactics encountered in professional football that such action
has a major effect on the result of the game
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Kind of like the basic speed law --- you are not allowed to drive faster than conditions allow or pornography which Potter Stewart famously said, you know it when you see it, this provision would CLEARLY subject a team that steals signals - say for example - by hiring an ex-Mosad agent to tap into the coaches headsets to STEAL SIGNALS.
You might say it doesn't but I don't think reasonable people would argue that it would be a tactic that is "so extraordinarily unfair or outside the accepted tactics encountered in professional football that such action has a major effect on the result of the game."
You;re just fishing I am afraid.
See teams in the league have a long long history of doing, knowing about, defending against, and having to put up with stolen signals.
That's why the league does not police stolen signals NOR their use---which has certainly happened before and was not something the Patriots invented. The policy is, and has been for a long time (long before Kraft and Goddell) that security is up to individual teams.
So they would have no reason to suddenly violate a longstanding policy in this case.
And in fact stolen signals are so common throughout league history that frankly it's just a pure stretch to claim that it's "EXTRAORDINARILY unfair." I mean if they WANTED to police that sort of thing, they could easily have put in a rule against stealing signals or using stolen signals long before now. And, they didn't.
What you offered there was a definition of the commissioner's powers, and then tried to stretch it to cover this. But all you have is the purely subjective claim that this instance of using stolen signals, as opposed to every single other instance in league history, is for some reason "extraordinary."
That's so unlikely that out of all the legal and journalistic accounts of spygate, going back years and including US senators, you're the first to try and make that stretch. Everyone else, including people with legal training and knowledge of the league and vested interest, never even bothered.
Since you searched, though, you can at least verify that the league has no rules against stealing signals nor in fact using stolen signals. Which again makes the entire "destroyed evidence" mantra irrelevant. Evidence of what? Nothing. The Patz violated a rule, were called on it, were punished for it, and there is no other pertinent rule.
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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2018 09:00AM by zn.
