superbowl

[Bloodline666]

For those of you who think the government has no business investigating Spygate or the allegations of the Pats video-taping the Rams' private walkthrough prior to Super Bowl XXXVI, simply because "the government has no business in sports", here's a wake-up call.

First of all, almost every team in sports plays in publicly-subsidized stadiums (meaning for those of you with professional sports teams in your hometowns, your taxes are paying for those stadiums). Not only that, but all games are played over airwaves controlled by federal licenses. Those licenses prohibit any pre-arrangement or artifice in what is presented as live competition. Because of latter fact, I think it should be investigated further by Congress, especially when you consider the fact that a former Pats video employee by the name of Matt Walsh claims to know more damning details of Spygate than what the league or the media and fans know, but will not go public with it unless the league or Congress asks for it directly, due to fear of retaliation by the Pats (with whom he signed a non-disclosure agreement as soon as he left the team).

However, a government investigation into cheating in sports is not unprecedented. The only reason Baseball even considered cracking down on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs is because they were threatened with legislative action by Congress. And now, with Andy Pettite, Roger Clemens, and Brian McNamee scheduled to testify before Congress in the wake of the Mitchell Report, Baseball could again come under fire from Congress. But even that wasn't the first time the Federal Government has been involved in sports scandals.

Federal investigations into athletic dishonesty go all the way back to 1920, when a grand jury convened to investigate the 1919 Chicago White Sox after rumors floated all year that they may have thrown the World Series, in what is now known as the Black Sox Scandal. The 8 players involved in that scandal were later acquitted (with help from the fact that key evidence to secure a conviction, including signed confessions by Eddie Cicotte and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, mysteriously disappeared from the hands of prosecutors), but even that did not save them from the wrath of newly-elected Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (arguably the most dictatorial commissioner in the history of sports).

So if a World Series (or multiple seasons worth of Baseball, for that matter) affected by cheating warranted a Federal investigation, then so, too, should a Super Bowl affected by cheating.