Before anyone suggests that I remove the tin-foil hat, that tin-foil hat came in handy during the Saints bounty scandal, when the NFL tried to put words in Anthony Hargrove’s mouth in order to bolster the appearance that Hargrove was anxious to recover payment for battering Vikings quarterback Brett Favre in the 2009 NFC title game. That tin-foil hat also came in handy when dissecting the backward-ass junk science of #DeflateGate, along with comparing Tom Brady’s sworn testimony during his internal appeal to the manner in which Brady’s words were distorted in the appeal ruling from Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Football players aren’t lawyers or linguists, skilled in properly maneuvering and manipulating words in order to avoid giving the league through inadvertence or lack of precision a chunk of syllables that can be used to support a Constanza-esque “a-ha!” and a finding of guilt that the league office is hoping to impose. So when the players tell the truth with words that may be bent into an alternative version of the truth, that’s a very good reason to not say anything.
Then there’s the possibility that they’ll be asked a laundry list of
questions about any and all communications with Charles Sly, the former Guyer Institute employee/intern/whatever whose claims already have been deemed to be not credible as to retired quarterback Peyton Manning but somehow retain potential credibility as to Packers linebacker Clay Matthews, Packers linebacker Julius Peppers, Steelers linebacker James Harrison, and free-agent defensive lineman Mike Neal.
If/when the players deny knowing, talking to, texting, or emailing Sly, next will quite possibly come the request for (drum roll, please) their cellphones, so that the absence of any communications with Sly can be confirmed.
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