Deflate-Gate has been an NFL scandal, a national media frenzy and now it will be the framework for a new law course at the University of New Hampshire.
Entitled “Deflategate: The Intersection of Sports Law and Journalism,” the course will explore sports controversies, their investigations and how the media chooses to cover them, so it won’t necessarily be about the ethics of deflating footballs or how mean Roger Goodell is being to poor Tom Brady.
UNH law professor Mike McCann will teach the course and he sees it as a good opportunity to engage students in areas of law that they might otherwise avoid.
“Sports law is a great way of teaching the law because you’re able to capture students’ attention,” McCann said. “There’s a sports story that they’re really interested in and you can use that to tell them about things like antitrust law, which is not a topic that is normally attractive to a student because it sounds hard and complicated.”
In addition to Deflategate, McCann plans to cover a veritable who’s who of sports scandals from Donald Sterling’s ousting from the NBA to Aaron Hernandez’s homicide trial to Pete Rose’s gambling on baseball.
Law professor Margaret Sova McCabe, who helped McCann develop the course, stated that the purpose of the class will be to study the process of investigations versus how the media chooses to portray the event.
“We started saying the controversy itself was such a great way to teach what we want to teach because it helps students think critically about what they’re reading in the press, how that may differ from any regulatory process that the NFL might be going through,” she said. “We really hope we can teach students through Mike’s course how to think critically about what they know and why they know it.”
If nothing else, we can say that Deflate-Gate birthed a whole class of lawyers who have a better understanding of sports and entertainment law. Thanks, Tom Brady!
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