Be careful New England Patriots fans; it’s a treacherous dismount from that high horse.
The science is ironclad: Tom Brady is a cheater, according to a 10-year-old’s fair-winning project. Ace Davis, who attends Millcreek Elementary in Lexington, Ky., wanted to do something diffe. 8, 2019, one week before New England's matchup with the Bengals, a Patriots staffer was found in the press box of the Bengals-Browns game taking video that reportedly included extended.
One week after the moral victory of an activist judge chastising the NFL and siding with the NFL Player’s Association in vacating Tom Brady’s four-game suspension, the New England Patriots are back in the news, this time for a fascinating, revelatory ESPN.com piece that details the 15 years of deceptions, scams and tricks — or, to be more frank, cheating — that aided in the Pats dynasty and each of the team’s four Super Bowl victories.
Games The Patriots Won Without Cheating Game
It’s a fascinating piece by Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham, one that essentially brands the Patriots as cheaters far beyond a few taped signals and a rogue ball boy with a needle. Their findings are that the Patriots were far deeper into tweaking the system than anyone knew and that Goodell’s overreach in Deflategate was caused by his undue haste in dismissing Spygate.
While you should read the whole thing — maybe not you, Patriots fans who still somehow think Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are virtues of paragon — here a five completely damning sentences from the piece:
• “During pregame warm-ups, a low-level Patriots employee would sneak into the visiting locker room and steal the play sheet, listing the first 20 or so scripted calls for the opposing team’s offense. (The practice became so notorious that some coaches put out fake play sheets for the Patriots to swipe.)”
• “A former Patriots employee who was directly involved in the taping system says “it helped our offense a lot,” especially in divisional games in which there was a short amount of time between the first and second matchups, making it harder for opposing coaches to change signals.”
• “During games, Walsh later told investigators, the Patriots’ videographers were told to look like media members, to tape over their team logos or turn their sweatshirt inside out, to wear credentials that said Patriots TV or Kraft Productions. The videographers also were provided with excuses for what to tell NFL security if asked what they were doing: Tell them you’re filming the quarterbacks.”
• “At Gillette Stadium, the scrambling and jamming of the opponents’ coach-to-quarterback radio line — “small s—” that many teams do, according to a former Pats assistant coach — occurred so often that one team asked a league official to sit in the coaches’ box during the game and wait for it to happen. Sure enough, on a key third down, the headset went out.”
• “Goodell said that he had spoken with Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie and then-head coach Andy Reid and that “both said the outcome of the 2005 Super Bowl was legitimate,” an assertion contradicted by the private feelings of many senior members of the team.”
Games The Patriots Won Without Cheating Wife
And there are so many more excerpts that could have been chosen. The article is a veritable gold mine of showing The Patriot Way is basically a hoodwink. That’s what’s so galling about it: New England would still probably win without these shenanigans. But because of them, it’s completely fair to call their dynasty into question.
Ever since the massive bungling of Deflategate came to pass, the popular question has been why any NFL owner would continue to support Roger Goodell? It’s a sentiment heard hundreds of times over the past few months and one I heard Tony Kornheiser ask Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins this very morning on his radio show. Why? The ESPN piece makes it clear: The other owners were fed up with the Pats and thought Goodell went easy on Spygate, so they gave him some sort of mandate to come down hard on Deflategate. In their eyes, who cares about the negative publicity? The NFL leads a flock and the sheep always gather on Sunday.
Goodell isn’t gone yet because the New England Patriots caused their own problems. It’s not his fault Bill Belichick wanted to tape signals or allegedly steal play sheets or keep a guy on the pay roll who named himself “The Deflator.” That’s all on the Pats. Integrity? What integrity?
But, unfortunately, we’re way too deep into this for minds to be changed because of that ESPN piece, even though it’s now abundantly clear that the Patriots seemed to systemically game the system for well over a decade en route to becoming the most successful team of their era. The defenders will say, “how much difference could it make,” while anyone who’s ever watched the very-common sight of NFL games hinging on one play would say “a lot.” What should happen? Nothing; these things are in the paint. They’ll taint the dyansty, but knowing about it won’t change the outcome of those games.
To be honest though, NFL fans don’t care about cheating, whether it be PEDs or stealing signals. The game it too big for that. So while those who thought New England fit the “once a cheater, always a cheater” idiom, nothing changes. To those who continue to keep their heads buried far in the sand, they’ll tune out the secrets of Spygate. And since it seems like New England won’t go down for their “culture of sneakiness,” as one former employee described, Roger Goodell might. All that enmity Pats fans built up toward the commissioner was apparently misplaced. He evidently did the Patriots a huge favor by ignoring their rogue, illegal methods of a decade ago — as that story wouldn’t have been as easily dismissed as Deflategate. Now, he might end up going down for trying to change that.