It is one of those situations in which it is tough to find a rooting interest.
Take your unsavoury pick: Bill Belichick, evil genius mastermind of the New England Patriots; Roger Goodell and the NFL, who would be most disinclined to stumble upon a smoking gun; Senator Arlen Specter, servant of the people, and of the cable giant Comcast, who makes the opportunists from the baseball steroids hearings look like pikers; Matt Walsh, the classic aggrieved former employee with an axe to grind; sadly, the Boston Herald, which in an era when the old paper-and-ink side of the business is under siege, made a very bad call indeed.
The active phase of the NFL espionage scandal (please, no more “gates” – all these years later, surely it's time to retire that one) seems about to peter out, despite Specter's best efforts to keep it alive.
Yesterday, after he was granted his own private audience with former New England video assistant Walsh, the senior senator from Pennsylvania called for U.S. congressional hearings on the Patriots' past practice of videotaping opponents' signals during games.
That was certainly cheating (even Goodell doesn't believe Belichick's feeble protest that he didn't realize it was against the rules), and for their sins, the Pats have already been punished with a $750,000 fine and a lost first-round draft choice.
But somehow, for Specter, there is something larger at stake, a question of the greater good, of public interest, which compels the government of the United States to intervene. “They [the NFL] owe the public a lot more candour and a lot more credibility,” Specter said.
It's an open question what they owe the public, other than to produce an entertainment option of which consumers may partake, or not. It's also an open question what Specter (in a past life, the author of the single-bullet theory while working for the Warren Commission) might owe the folks at Comcast, who have contributed generously to his political war chest and who have been involved in a protracted war with the NFL over Sunday Ticket, the NFL Network and a host of side issues.
The NFL enjoys a limited anti-trust exemption (it applies only to the league negotiating television deals as a single entity rather than having each franchise operate on its own), which Specter threatens on a regular basis. But what's perhaps most telling is he also espoused congressional intervention over the Philadelphia Eagles' suspension of Terrell Owens way back when.
Now there's a public servant with his priorities in order.
But even if, for the sake of argument, it is agreed Specter is a self-serving, grandstanding political hack, that doesn't mean those who oppose him are good guys by extrapolation. Belichick quite obviously went beyond the time-honoured practice in sports, and elsewhere, of seizing every advantage, of playing right to the edge of the rules. The scheme for stealing signals was ingenious, but it was also wrong – and no, it appears, not everyone else was doing it.
Goodell, who has revelled in the role of law-and-order commissioner since taking office, punishing players for on-field and off-field misdeeds with a decisive flourish, was clearly a whole lot less comfortable dealing with an issue that played to the credibility of one of the NFL's greatest teams, and by extension, the league itself. Why he chose to destroy the tapes originally produced by the Patriots will remain a question for conspiracy theorists for years to come.
And in going out on that particular limb the day before the Super Bowl, printing a story about the Patriots taping a walk-through of a previous Super Bowl opponent without seeing the tape, or talking to anyone who had seen the tape, you have to wonder whether the Herald was responding badly to the pressure of the new media, old media battle to get something fresh, first.
No one is covered in glory here. No one can really hold his or her head high and claim he or she did the right thing.
Even for the Teflon NFL, a bit of the smell will linger into the fall, and beyond that if the Patriots again contend for a championship. That doesn't make it an issue for Congress. That doesn't make Specter's posture any less ludicrous.
But he can take satisfaction knowing they're all in this together, down in the dirt.
