Robert Saleh is Accusing the Jaguars Coaching Staff of Stealing Signals. Let the National Hysteria Begin!
Sean Gardner. Getty Images.If there's one thing we've learned about organized team sports over the past 20 years or so, is that the one unpardonable sin is cheating in the form of trying to steal an opponent's signs. Such actions represent all the Unforgivable Curses (Avada Kedavra, Crucio and Imperio) all rolled into one.
To even attempt to do so destroys the integrity of the game. Undermines the public's confidence. And threatens to destroy the time/space continuum. Which is why any allegation has to be met with the full fury the American public can muster. With equal amounts of outrage. In every, single instance.
It's just that some instances are more equal than others. So when Robert Saleh accuses the Jaguar's coaching staff of stealing signs ahead of the 49ers game against them in Ireland:
… job of it. We have to be great with our signals. Be great with our communication to combat some of those tells we might give on the field.”
… he not only goes out of his way to let them off the hook by declaring it "legal," he praises them for being so good at it. He makes it sound like Coen is Alan Turing. And the guys he hired away from Kevin O'Connell in Minnesota, Grant Udinski and Shaun Sarrett, are his Gordon Welchman and Hugh Alexander, working at Bletchley Park to crack the German's Enigma Code. It's something to be celebrated, not cost Coen a half million dollars and the Jags a 1st round draft pick.
Which should come as a surprise to this guy:
… but wouldn't because he knows what we all knew in 2007. It was never about cameras or their location:
It was always about trying to bring down a Dynasty by any means necessary. Trying to stop the Patriots off the field because no one could do it on the field. Even, in the case of the disgraced inventor of the JFK "Magic Bullet" theory Arlen Specter (R-Hell), threatening a Congressional investigation.
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But in Jacksonville's case, this will be met with a collective national shrug. Just like no one cared when the St. Louis Cardinals were literally hacking into the Houston Astros files in 2015. Or when the Astros were caught dead-to-rights using a camera to steal signs all the way to a World Series win in 2017, but got the slappiest of wrist slaps for it. And the last I noticed, Conor Stalions might not be with Michigan, and Jim Harbaugh isn't allowed back in the NCAA for 10 years, but their National Championship trophy still is. And it looks exactly like all the other, non-signal stealing teams' trophies from all their Nattys.
The point being that the outrage on these things is always selective. There is an entirely different set of rules, applied differently depending on how good you are and how impossibly long you've been crushing your opposition. That's as true now as it was 18 years ago.