Voluptuous Thinking

Cowherd Wrong About Spygate

May 15, 2008 | Sports

It’s rare that I disagree with Colin Cowherd on a lot of issues.  As he often says, his arguments are reasonable.  He’s thought them through.  He’s also entertaining.  In listening to Mr. Cowherd, he sounds like a smart man who “gets it.”  However, he’s wrong about “Spygate” and its effects on the National Football League.

Spygate has been one of those topics Mr. Cowherd has beaten into the ground.  Either he is very interested in it or his employers want to keep the NFL in the forefront of ESPN Radio programming.  ESPN has a vested interest in doing this.  However, so does the watching and listening public.  We rank football head and shoulders above any sport in terms of viewing and listening habits.  As he often says, he is giving us what we want.  I wouldn’t mind so much him beating it into the ground.  But he’s wrong here just as he was wrong on steroids.  However, in pointing this out, there are broader issues to be addresses.  First, Spygate.

In saying he’s wrong on this, I point to one faulty comparison he made a week or two ago about cheating.  He said there are many ways to cheat in the NFL from scouting to the playing field.  However, he also made it sound that one was equal to the other in terms of actual effect on wins and losses.  In short, cheating on a draft pick does not have the same effect as stealing signals mid game.  So, he couldn’t be more wrong. 

I’ll take the “for instance” I am most closest to: war.  Besides, there are plenty of NFL analysts who (wrongly) compare players to warriors and games to wars.  So, I beg anyone to tell me that recruiting a soldier means more during a war than having an enemy know what you’ll bomb, when you’ll bomb and how often you’ll bomb it.  The recruit is important, yes.  However, knowing an enemy’s war plans ahead of time is a bee line for losses of life, territory and, ultimately, battles.  In short, Mr. Cowherd is saying other off-the-field cheating is as egregious and harmful as violations while games are being played (or, more directly, violations than can affect game play from week to week).  That’s unreasonable and silly.

Mr. Cowherd is poo-pooing the issue.  He did the same with the “steroids” issue.  At one point in his coverage of the evolving performance-enhancing drugs crisis that overtook baseball, he said (and I paraphrase), “we don’t talk about it because people can’t get their arms around it.  There’s too much science.  It’s too big.  There’s just nothing there that makes for good radio.” 

Just Wednesday, May 14, he peeked at the standings and noticed the teams at the top were some of the youngest teams in the league – Florida, Tampa Bay and so on.  They are teams who have fewer people who had to kick performance-enhancing drugs.  Fewer teams embroiled with players who juiced.  And Mr. Cowherd’s summary?  “Boy, baseball is going to get pretty boring by the end of the year if these teams are still in first place.”  I don’t disagree.  But the discussion is an outgrowth of the performance-enhancing drug scandal.  The underlying problem for Mr. Cowherd is that ESPN also has a significant investment in Major League Baseball.  He does, however, admit that he confines most of his conversations to the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, their players and so on.  That brings us back to Spygate.

If the two teams involved in Spygate were the Detroit Lions and the Cincinnati Bengals, Mr. Cowherd wouldn’t be breathing a word about this – and he’s probably said as much on shows I’ve missed.  He’s an admitted populist and shys away from anything that doesn’t hit on the most popular sports topics.  Again I don’t discredit him for this; it is his job and as he says, he’s in the omelet business, not the egg business.  But Spygate is the New York Jets (the accusers) and the New England Patriots.  The most populous areas of the country.  Lots of money.  A huge demographic for his radio show.  In short, an east coast bias for the conspiracy theorists. 

Mr. Cowherd has said over and over that he gets a ton of email on the topic.  I’d guess most of it comes from those two markets.  And yes, he does still make it an almost daily topic.  However, he’s off base here.  He brings guests on to try and prove his points.  None agree.   Former players and coaches consistently tell him that it means a lot to have those signals and if they were used in the game, it means even more.  Mr. Cowherd retorts by making the case that New England is a great team without the stolen signals (it is) and that it would have won regardless (it did).  I agree.  However, he’s not lending the discussion of wartime cheating being worse than peacetime enough credit.  He may be doing this simply to ensure his audience is polarized one way or the other.  In that case, he’s just being a good radio host.  As I mentioned, he’s a smart person and knows what drives rating – and isn’t shy to speak about it on radio.

New England’s already been punished for this.  The Boston Newspapers lied about the Rams walkthrough tapes.  It’s done.  Cheating still goes on in other forms.  It does in every sport.  As Mr. Cowherd would say, it is what it is.  Spygate won’t go away anytime soon, though Roger Goddell, the NFL commissioner, seems to have handled the mess quite well. .  Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania seems to have a vested interest in the scandal, though, so, if nothing else, Mr. Cowherd has an NFL discussion that will get him through until preseason football starts.

Mr. Cowherd’s arguments are often reasonable, but not on Spygate.  I’m not naïve about ratings or feeding the masses.  However, if Mr. Cowherd is as reasonable as he claims, he might take a second look at the process and approach the issue with a different mindset.