To absolutely no one's surprise, there was more to the ESPN Spygate stuff...

Stop me if you've heard this one before with respect to ESPN and the NFL.

Even though I am personally stunned the NFL allowed the article to go on as printed (though my anonymous friend makes a good point vis-a-vis that the league might've just gone and thrown the Patriots under the bus and said "fuck it"), Deadspin and Pro Football Talk have found at least two major points edited out of an ESPN Boston response to the article by Mike Reiss.

First, the five points in the article which did make print:

1) The fact that Deflate-Gate was considered a "makeup call".  As I said, I consider this ridiculous, because, basically, Goodell is in personal knowledge of facts which indicate none of the Patriots Super Bowl victories were done with any degree of NFL legality and legitimacy, over and above the NFL's rigging of games toward the Patriots.

I had questions about the two middle ones until the ESPN report.  No more now.

2) The Patriots are in everybody's head.  Well, yeah.  When it's obvious that not only, as one article title put it, the Patriots are cheating in every way possible, but the league is covering for a lot of it, it's not hard to come to that conclusion!

3) Bill Belichick WAS within the "gray area" of the rules before they were changed.  Shyeah and right.

4) Other teams did it too.  I don't think there's any real dispute that a massive amount of cheating has changed a number of championships to "the right teams" -- right, DeBartolo 49ers?  *cough*  Doesn't change the fact that it was pervasive and perfected under the Patriots.

5) Belichick's comments in January.

And he left the fifth one at that.

The apparent problem is that there were two more things that Reiss wanted to add to it, and that ESPN took out (quotes from the PFT/Deadspin stuff):

A)  “Security’s extremely tight throughout Gillette Stadium. Don’t think too many people, if any, are casually walking into the visitors’ locker room. And let’s just say they are, who leaves play sheets around?”

Yeah.  Security, if you believe the article, is probably so tight to actually guard against NFL Security actually going around on some of the illegal photographers and such!  If you don't think the local security don't know the advantages being procured, you're dumb or part of the cover-up.

B)  “When you’re at the top, everyone likes to bring you down. A longtime sportscaster with a deep history in Boston relayed this thought to me that resonated: ‘They used to say same the stuff about Red Auerbach.’”

Did they have over 90 people, from in- and outside the organization, doing so?

Come back to me when they do.

It's another round of Boston homerism, frankly, and needs to be discarded as such.