Senator Spector to meet with NFL Commissioner over Cheating
Similiar to the begining of Congressional inquries on MLB steriod use. For baseball, Congress used the "public health" catchall to justify their interest in the matter. This time it appears that any official Congressional actions will be under the rallying cry of "violations of anti-trust agreement" the NFL operations unders. At the current moment, Spector is going alone on the issue, but he is the chair of the judicial committee... which may soon find this issue more intriging and marketable than the other issues they could be examining...
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I believe the NFLs antitrust exemption to which Specter is referring is limited to the negotiation of broadcasting rights, it's not as broad as MLBs. So in that way it's a pretty thin justification for looking into whether or not the Patriots videotaped stuff they shouldn't have. But it will get him on TV. Already has, I guess. Maybe now that they lost he won't care as much.
This whole thing between the MLB steroid investigation, and now congress wants to start to look into the spygate idea that occured earlier this season is really frustrating for me. The fact that our economy is suppose to be heading into a reccession, we still have troops in Iraq, and many other matters that congress should be addressing and yet our great congress is debating about sports. Coming from a man who watches, eats, and dreams sports, drop the sports and get with the real deal. Let the investigation become the responsibility of the sport and not congress. If your really that interested become a private investigator and investigate off of your own dollars and not the public.
Congress can do more than one thing at a time (in theory), so it's not offensive to me on that level. There's a lot of them, they have big staffs, etc. It's just a meeting, and then potentially one hearing by one committee for a few hours on one day. Rather, what concerns me is the sense of entitlement to their interest in something that they have a complete lack of justification for being involved in other than arbitrarily holding an irrelevant antitrust exemption over the NFLs head, especially when the senator in question just happens to be from the home state of Comcast (slighted by the NFL when negotiating the distribution of NFL Network and Sunday Ticket) and a team that lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl a few years back. It's exactly the kind of symbolic politics that the MLB hearings were/are, worse even. If Specter had some sort of moral qualm with the NFL or the Patriots he could have, you know, CALLED Roger Goodell rather than go on ESPN and announce that he was going to call Roger Goodell. The guy worked for the Warren Commission and now he's pandering for name recognition on cable sports networks. That said, I think it would be absolutely amazing to see Bill Belichick testify in front of a Senate committee.
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