Deflategate: Fans Broadly Back NFL Sanctions; Eight in 10 Suspect Other Teams, Too (POLL)

— -- Americans overall, and avid fans in particular, broadly support NFL sanctions against New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and his team for using underinflated footballs in January’s AFC title game.

But the sport has a bigger problem: Eighty-five percent in a new ESPN/ABC News poll think other teams do the same kind of thing.

See PDF for full results and charts.

The national survey finds Americans by more than a 2-1 margin lining up behind the league’s move this week to suspend Brady for four games, fine the Patriots $1 million and dock it two draft picks: Sixty-three percent support the action, vs. 26 percent opposed. Support rises to 76 percent among avid fans, and 69 percent of those fans say flat out that Brady cheated.

But the controversy may not define the celebrated quarterback’s career: Despite the episode, 63 percent of Americans, rising to 73 percent of avid fans, say they’d support Brady’s eventual election to the Professional Football Hall of Fame.

The public is somewhat less forgiving in other measures. Only a narrow majority overall, 52 percent, sees Brady as a role model for young people; that goes negative among those who think he cheated. And the public splits on whether the Patriots’ Super Bowl championship is now tainted, although avid fans are less apt to think so.

That said, perhaps the most troubling result in the poll, produced for ESPN and ABC News by Langer Research Associates, is the sense that the deflation incident represents broader practice. A mere 6 percent think this kind of thing is limited to the Patriots; 85 percent say “it happens with other NFL teams as well.”

That includes vast majorities of fans and non-fans and Brady critics and supporters alike. Even among avid fans, just 12 percent see the situation as limited to the New England team.

The Patriots were sanctioned in 2007 for videotaping opposing teams’ coaches to study their play signals. But the poll’s result on suspected misdeeds elsewhere indicates the public overwhelmingly sees this not as a Patriots-only issue, but as an example of broader behavior in the league.

The NFL based its sanctions on an investigation by attorney Ted Wells that, while lacking conclusive evidence, found it “more probable than not” that Patriots personnel deflated balls intentionally before the AFC game and that Brady probably was “at least generally aware” of it. Two lower-level employees were implicated; the team’s coaches and other senior management were not.

Perhaps as a result, just a narrow majority of Americans, 52 percent, say the Patriots cheated; 38 percent think not, with the rest unsure. As with Brady himself, though, belief that the team cheated rises among avid fans, in this case to 63 percent.

FANS – Differences among fans are notable, especially the way avid fans differentiate among issues given their appreciation for the sport. On one hand, as noted, they’re especially likely to support the sanctions and to say Brady and the Patriots cheated. On the other, avid fans also are more apt than occasional or nonfans to support Brady for the Hall of Fame and to see him as a good role model, and much more apt than others to say the Super Bowl victory is not tainted by this incident (58 percent take that position). All these suggest that avid fans’ views of Brady and the Patriots’ sports achievements mitigate the damage from the deflation incident.