Any such evidence has to be visible to us. So when I say there's no evidence I mean none I'm aware of.
No...he's saying, you may be right that Armstrong wasn't the only one doping...but if there is even ONE guy who wasn't doping during that time then HE should be crowned champion.
It never ceases to amaze me how people will defend these guys. They are cheaters, and it should be assumed that their success was influenced by the cheating. I don't care if it was minimal or if the cheating was directly responsible for the dominance. It certainly affected their winning. You want to minimize the cheating by making the argument about how much it helped, and that's not even the point.
Right.. but suppose hypothetically that no one else was clean. Then what? It seems like what KeyFin wrote agrees with "level playing field". Well we'll see. He can answer that himself. I'd accept that as evidence of the impact of cheating if you can independently show the cheating started in 2001. Otherwise you have quotes from guys like Steve Young that say he was cheating while in Cleveland and you have that 5-11 record in 2000 with the Patriots. There's another event that occurred in 2001 that might help explain this: Tom Brady. Now I know they still went 11-5 without Brady in 2008, so it's hard to say how much of Belichick's success is due to Brady (or vice versa), but without independent evidence the cheating started in 2001 you really can't use the dominance since that time as evidence of the impact of cheating.
Yeah Brady fell to the 6th because everyone, including BB, just missed their evals on him. How many times did the Pats pass on Brady in that draft? Clearly they didn't think he had the potential to be the GOAT. If they had thought that, they wouldn't have waited until the 6th. But we're to believe that Brady came in and turned that franchise around? It defies logic. Perhaps the cheating combined with the Pats scheme is simply more important than many want to admit.
Just goes to show player evals are an inexact science. Does it also defy logic that Kurt Warner, an undrafted QB, took an offense ranked 24th by points to three consecutive #1 rankings winning the SB the first year and making it to the SB his 3rd year? Or was that cheating + system too? You know Warren Moon was also undrafted. Not in Brady's league, but just because a guy is drafted low or undrafted doesn't mean it defies logic he'd become a great player. Tons of examples if you include other positions.
Johhny Unitas was a 9th round pick, (about a 4th round pick by mondern standards) and was cut by the Steelers before trying out for and being picked up by the Colts. Bart Starr was a 17th round pick (200 overall) Both had pretty decent careers
Yeah if we're going that far back don't forget Roger Staubach, 10th round. Also, Joe Montana and Russell Wilson were 3rd rounders.. I wonder why no one picked them earlier?
In a previous career I investigated insurance claims. One thing that I can tell you with 100% surety is that you can’t find fraud (cheating) if you don’t look for it. If you look at the New Orleans bounty scandal, at first the NFL accepted NO’s claim that “no sir, we would never put bounties on opposing players.” at face value. It was only when other information came out that they investigated and, shock, horror, the Saints were actually paying bounties. The NFL’s record of investigations of scandals don’t fill me with confidence that they could find their own a**hole even using both hands and a flashlight.
lol that last sentence is a great way of putting it. Still doesn't mean you lower the threshold because you don't have the evidence.
Staubach dropped because of his military commitments, he gave 4 or 5 yearsof his career to the Navy. Without that he would have been a 1st rounder.
That's ludicrous, your draft stock has nothing to do with what kind of player you turn out to be. Kurt Warner went undrafted and went on to win league MVP X2 and guide 2 different teams to SB's. Johnny U was a 9th round pick, Montana was a 3rd round pick, Zach Thomas was a 5th round pick who was too small, if 1983 draft was redone a guarantee Marino goes 1st or 2nd overall yet he was passed up 26 times. Kevin Greene was a 5th rounder and is 3rd in career sacks behind only Reggie White and Bruce Smith, John Randle has the most sacks of any DT in NFL history and went undrafted. It happens sometimes player get over looked, sometimes player take time to develop, sometimes players are better pro's than college players, and sometimes scouts are wrong which is why we have NFL draft busts and late round gems.
Doesn't change the fact he was drafted in the 10th round. If people knew how good he was going to become you'd think he would have been drafted earlier.
Unfortunately lack of faith in their ability to investigate and discover cheating leads to speculation - founded or unfounded. That’s why so many people are willing to lower the threshold when it comes to the NFL/Patriots situation. Add in to that the Pat’s well documented habit of exploiting any hole in the rules they find, makes it hard to accept that the Pat’s organisation acts in good faith when it comes to explicit cheating that they think probably won’t get discovered.
There was a genuine risk of having a combat soldier in the VietNam war suffering from terminal kinetic energy poisoning.
Exactly, and that's when former coaches and players kinda chuckle when discussing all the "cheating" they did in their day.
I'm against all forms of cheating in anything- whether it's a board game, a sport or something in business. To me, whether or not something was gained by cheating doesn't belong in the equation at all.....if you cheat, you're a loser. I'm sure there's always exceptions to be found- like Edelman being suspended this off-season. He swears up and down that his training regimen hasn't changed and he hasn't taken anything different....and I believe the guy. If he failed from something like an energy shot or something stupid like that, then I agree with you....he's not a cheater because he didn't do anything to gain a competitive advantage. Lance Armstrong certainly did though and it doesn't matter to me if "everyone else is doing it"....if absolutely everyone broke the rules, then cancel the sport for the year. Or like I said, crown the one guy left who didn't use steroids because he's the best legal athlete in the sport. You have to remember, we are are talking about purposefully cheating to gain a perceived advantage. To me, it's the same as Ricky Williams smoking weed- there was no advantage there at all, but he broke the rules. How can you suspend someone for weed or beating their wife or deflating footballs while saying it's perfectly okay to ignore other rules? I just can't see that viewpoint- once you let one person cheat and get away with it, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, then you've compromised the entire integrity of the league.
Hmm.. maybe that's why there are people who believe in the moon-landing hoax. Neil Armstrong was a cheater! lol.. just kidding! (I know you meant Lance Armstrong)
One of the things that always puzzled me was the baseball players Union taking the part of the steroid cheaters, and ignoring the poor guys, who were clean, who either lost their jobs or had their income severely minimized by being on behind the cheaters in the Depth chart.
That’s legit cheating. Having some office geek go through the opponents trash can looking for gameplay info is crafty in my book. I think a handful of teams employ some sort of former CIA consultant to do odd things we will never know about.
