Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about the Falcons’ NoiseGate scandal?

The New England Patriots’ Super Bowl LI bid was an opportunity for everyone to start talking about DeflateGate again. Actually, who are we kidding? The DeflateGate talk never actually stopped. But people seem to have forgotten that the Atlanta Falcons got in a little trouble with the NFL right around the same time for their own cheating scandal, affectionately known as NoiseGate.

What is NoiseGate, besides yet another nickname for a scandal with a -gate suffix that sounds really stupid? Well, to fully understand the devastation of NoiseGate and its far-reaching implications, we must revisit the Falcons’ 2013 and 2014 seasons.

The Falcons had high hopes for 2013 after they wrapped up the 2012 season with a 13-3 record and a loss in the NFC Championship. Unfortunately, a rash of devastating injuries hindered the team’s success in 2013, and Atlanta finished with a 4-12 record.

Atlanta improved slightly in 2014, but nobody would call a 6-10 record a success. At some point during this timeframe, when the Falcons were busy winning 10 out of the 32 games the team played over that two-year span, the NFL discovered that the Falcons were piping fake crowd noise into the Georgia Dome.

The Falcons did break the rules by pumping fake crowd noise into the stadium, and they deserved to be punished for it. The league sanctioned the Falcons pretty harshly, but still, it’s not an ongoing discussion like DeflateGate has been. There are a few reasons for that.

In response to NoiseGate, the Falcons lost a fifth-round draft pick in the 2016 NFL Draft. In addition, Atlanta was fined $350,000. Team president Rich McKay, who serves on the NFL’s competition committee, was suspended from the committee for one year. He had served as the committee’s chairman.

Falcons owner Arthur Blank made his displeasure with the rule-breaking clear.

“Of course it bothers me,” Blank said to ESPN. “Absolutely it bothers me. We have great respect for the shield and the integrity of the game; the integrity of competition. So that bothers me a great deal. We will deal with it.”

They did deal with it. The team fired then-director of event marketing Roddy White — yes, there are two Roddy Whites, and no, the wide receiver didn’t have anything to do with NoiseGate — for his role in the fake noise situation. The Falcons also fulfilled all elements of the league’s punishment without attempting to appeal any aspect of it.

To put it plainly, the Falcons were bad during the timeframe that fake crowd noise was being pumped into the Georgia Dome. It’s hard to argue that the Falcons gained any kind of competitive advantage when the team won just three home games in 2013.

In 2014, three of the Falcons’ six wins came at home. That fake noise wasn’t helping the Falcons win games, or enough games to matter, anyway.

It’s hard for anyone to get worked up about cheating if that cheating doesn’t result in any kind of distinct benefit for the team that cheated.

Yeah, I said it. The Patriots, because of years and years of success, are a team that the media loves to discuss. Bill Belichick’s every word is dissected by the media, as is Tom Brady’s. And the Patriots have a long and storied history of getting in trouble with the league for breaking rules.

Remember SpyGate, when the Patriots got in trouble for improperly videotaping opponents to steal signals? Or the ongoing drama that is HeadsetGate, because opponents’ headsets never seem to work within the unfriendly confines of Gillette Stadium?

There’s not much of a history of rule-breaking in Atlanta, and that does make a difference.

You’ll almost certainly hear plenty of comments about DeflateGate on Super Bowl Sunday. If you don’t hear anyone mention NoiseGate, this is why.