What is a football?

A football is an elliptically shaped object made out the butts of swine, used in the game of football. Butt makes up the exterior while the interior — and this is important — is filled with pressurized air. However, the New England Patriots apparently didn’t know that when they provided game balls for the AFC Championship and possibly even the divisional round, as sources from the Baltimore Ravens claim.

So with this scandal unfolding and the Patriots set to play in the Super Bowl, people wonder if the NFL will do anything. And the answer to that is obvious.

No, they won’t.

Why not? It’s a pretty outrageous thing to ask a league to kick a team out of the Super Bowl because deflated balls may have changed the outcomes of two or three games. When’s the last time a major sports league has done something totally justifiable, even though it came off as really ballsy? Maybe the Pete Rose ban? The media would go crazy, and if many people respond negatively, it’s Roger Goodell’s head. And look at scheduling, too. You’d be giving Seattle extra weeks off the playing field, which is unfair to them. Moving the nation’s most anticipated sporting event back a week or two would drive everyone insane.

So I guess the kind of pointless question for discussion is: If it wasn’t extremely complicated, would it be OK to punish the Patriots by kicking them out of the Super Bowl?

Yeah, I think so.

And again, just because a decision seems wacky doesn’t mean it isn’t justifiable. Look again at Pete Rose and his ban from Major League Baseball for betting. Rose was one of the greatest hitters ever: baseball fans everywhere love him and still cannot get over that decision. However, he broke the rules many times, and the punishment was both appropriate and consistent with similar decisions.

Back to football. I want to also point out that this isn’t the only time the Patriots have done something sketchy. Not even the first with Bill Belichick as coach (though that isn’t to say that Belichick is the mastermind of the recent event). Remember Spygate? Yeah, with pretty much only one $500,000 fine handed out to Belichick, the Patriots got off pretty easy, only losing a draft pick. I’m a big believer in not blaming circumstances beyond a team’s control, like referees. But when a team does something like that to give themselves an unfair advantage, they pretty much deserve to get a spanking over a stern talking-to. Fines mean nothing to millionaires, and If you give that to players for wearing gold cleats, then deflating balls should definitely make you take legitimate action. So if not for the murky waters, I would totally give out a severe penalty.

In reality, though, the Patriots will probably lose to Seattle, get fined about the same amount that Tom Brady makes in a week, lose a draft pick or two, and be back in the news for something like this in a few years.