Extra Points: The crass meets the ignorant

Jan 23, 2015 - 3:53 PM (SportsNetwork.com) - If you got the feeling Bill Belichick wanted to go all Col. Jessup in his DeflateGate press conference, you're hardly alone.

"Your @#$-damn right, I deflated those footballs," I pictured Belichick screaming after getting sufficiently frustrated by a bunch of know-nothings who just don't understand what goes on in the NFL.

Unlike Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," however, the world's most envied football coach played the plausible-deniability card instead, probably a more prudent move considering his team is getting ready for the sports' biggest stage, Super Bowl XLIX.

"I was shocked to learn of the footballs on Monday. I had no knowledge until Monday morning," Belichick claimed. "I'd say I've learned a lot more about this process in the last three days than I knew, or had talked about it, in the last 40 years that I've coached in this league."

That put the "ball" in Tom Brady's court who decided to go the more flippant, frat-boy route, a tact which brings with it a little more peril.

Sure it's fun to troll an unknowing media gaggle blinded by its torches and pitchforks with testicle gags that would make Pete Schwetty proud, but anger the wrong person and all of a sudden the moral-compass crowd is climbing the world's tallest soapbox to ask for suspension or even a ban.

And when the "low-information majority" starts rolling downhill, you might as well get out of the way because it's like Jim Brown bearing down on a crowned field.

"When I pick those footballs out, at that point, to me, they're perfect," Brady said. "I don't want anyone touching the balls after that. I don't want anyone rubbing them, putting any air in them, taking any air out. To me, those balls are perfect, and that's what I expect when I show up on the field."

The more sophomoric of us quickly picked up on Brady's David Gregory-like jabs at people so serious they had no idea they were the butt of the joke.

Already a few of those buzzkills have called for Belichick to be banned because Brady likes a lighter PSI than an arcane rule book permits as if the NFL wants the understudies performing in the world's largest Broadway play.

Some of them have even pointed to the now-famed Roger Goodell "ignorance is no excuse," edict toward Sean Payton in Bountygate, as if consistent, standardized logic has anything to do with the NFL commissioner.

Here's the reality:

If Walt Anderson and other officials who handle the footballs each and every week can't discern the difference in PSI, how can it possibly matter all that much?

Perhaps more importantly, if everyone thinks it's so much easier to handle the football with a lower PSI, why isn't that the recommended inflation point for a league obsessed with offense?

And if the proper PSI is so important to the integrity of the game and anyone in the sport actually cared, this would be the world's easiest fix -- make everyone play with a brand new football right out of the box.

It's 13.0 PSI for all.

See how the quarterbacks in this league enjoy that little tweak.

Brady's biggest mistake wasn't his love of a lower PSI, however, it was his nod to the Islamic-extremist group ISIS when trying to fight if off.

"Things are going to be fine -- this isn't ISIS," the former golden boy said. "No one's dying."

Except common sense.

Invoking a bloodthirsty terrorist group to deflect this nonsense was as insensitive as it gets by Brady.

And maybe the other side of the microphone, the reporters assembled who lobbed grenade after grenade at Brady for 30 minutes over a trivial matter, should learn something from his comments as well.

When the crass meets the ignorant, we all lose.