The national media and fans and current and retired NFL players and anyone else who needs to put their two cents in won't be satisfied until the New England Patriots lose the Super Bowl for this season and, even then, that won't quench their thirst for validation of their suspicion. Sad.
But I won't resort to such cheap shots. With these educated men, I'm going to take the high road. I’m going to respond with an appeal to their intellect befitting such learned, erudite gentlemen.
Allow me to refer to Gustave Le Bon's 1895 tome "The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind." It is a treatise on how to influence the masses with propaganda in order to sway public sentiment to your every whim. Le Bon's work was a huge influence on facist buttinskis from Hitler to Stalin and everyone in between. I quote:
"It was Napoleon, I believe, who said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, repetition. The thing affirmed comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind in such a way that it is accepted as a demonstrated truth.
"The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. … When we have read a hundred, a thousand, times that X's chocolate is the best, we imagine we have heard it said in many quarters, and we end by acquiring the certitude that such is the fact."
Thus, the Patriots are cheaters. Why? Because we keep hearing they are cheaters. Michael Wilbon says they've been caught "repeatedly." Jerome Bettis calls them "felons." Albert Breer uses the word “pattern." Sports Illustrated posts a crazy, incoherent screed that sounds like something out of Infowars about the giant TV outside Gillette Stadium and jammed helmet radios. And all of it is accepted truth by the naive sheeple ready to accept the lie rather than look at the truth.
It's groupthink. An explanation for why one team is so much more successful than all the others that's way easier for the great unwashed mob to digest than the truth, which is the Patriots scout, draft, manage, game-plan, practice, coach and play better than other teams. But guys like Sherman, Richardson, Mangold and the media are way too ready to lap up the snake oil they’re selling to each other than face the facts.
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