On Tuesday morning, Outside the Lines reporters Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham published a long, searing piece of investigative journalism covering the history of Bill Belichick’s Patriots, the widespread cheating he oversaw leading up to what became Spygate, and how it informed and influenced Roger Goodell’s ham-fisted Deflategate investigation. It’s a triumph of journalism, but it’s also a tome, so we’re here to break it down to the (many) water-cooler points you need to know. Saddle up, Patriots fans. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
- Between 2000, when Bill Belichick was hired as head coach, and 2007, when Spygate went public, the Patriots illegally videotaped opponents’ signals for at least 40 games.
- Many saw the way Spygate was dealt with as inappropriately lenient on the Patriots, and Deflategate as the “makeup call,” with Goodell proving to the rest of the league that he was no longer favoring Robert Kraft.
- Belichick retains the services of his childhood friend Ernie Adams, whose title is Football Research Director, but who devised and oversaw much of the spying practices employed by Belichick going back to his time coaching the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s.
- As the Patriots were winning their Super Bowls in the early 2000s, they were also amassing a sizable video library of teams’ defensive signals. One Patriots staffer told OTL “it got out of control.”
- When Goodell learned of this library (and when the spying was close to becoming public), he levied his punishment for Spygate before any league employees had examined the evidence. He ordered all the tapes to be destroyed (“NFL executives stomped the videotapes into small pieces and fed Adams’ notes into a shredder”), a decision that raised suspicions around the league (and from Senator Arlen Specter).
- The employees enlisted in the spying wore disguises. From the OTL story:
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. Or the kickers. Or footage for a team show.
- Ernie Adams would sit in the coaches’ box during games and talk directly to Belichick when he saw signals he recognized.
- Current and former Patriots employees differ in opinion on how much the filming of signals actually helped the team. An employee who helped with filming said it helped “a lot,” while a former coach said that it barely helped at all because Adams was “horrible”:
Another former coach says “Ernie is the guy who you watch football with and says, ‘It’s going to be a run!’ And it’s a pass. ‘It’s going to be a pass!’ And it’s a run. ‘It’s going to be a run!’ It’s a run. ‘I told you!'”
- Filming signals was not the only method the Patriots employed to gain an unseemly edge. This might be the best bit from the whole piece:
Several [Patriots employees] acknowledge that 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.)
Incredible! Fake play sheets! Now you understand why coaches never see their families and are often monomaniacal near-sociopaths — it’s because they have to deal with Belichick.
- Eric Mangini, former Patriots assistant (and Belichick’s protege), really was the man who, as head coach of the New York Jets, put his foot down rather than complaining in back channels (like OTL claims teams did for years). He was acutely aware of the Patriots’ practices, and caught the Pats in the act. Bringing the Patriots’ cheating public forced Goodell’s hand; without it, who knows how long Belichick would have continued his spying.
- The NFL warned the Patriots to stop multiple times before Spygate broke.
- Members of each of the three teams the Patriots defeated in Super Bowls during the period of spying all claim that the practices directly contributed to competitive advantages in those games. A Panthers source said that before they rewrote their game plan for the second half of Super Bowl XXXVIII, “it was like [the Patriots] were in our huddle.” The Steelers also complained that cheating affected two separate AFC Championship games, in 2002 and 2005.
- OTL claims that Roger Goodell lied deliberately and repeatedly to the public (and even to Sen. Specter when the two met) about the extent of the Patriots’ spying, repeatedly downplaying the extent of the cheating, presumably to save face. He claimed that the Eagles were satisfied that their loss in Super Bowl XXXIX was legitimate, which OTL asserts was not the case in the least.
- Specter could sense he was being deceived, and pressed an investigation, even though (according to his 2012 book, Life Among the Cannibals) a “powerful person” said that if he backed off, “there could be a lot of money for him in Palm Beach.” Specter was unmoved.
- The most controversial example of possible Patriots spying was for Belichick’s first Super Bowl as head coach, the upset victory over the Rams. Mike Martz designed all-new plays for the game, but the Patriots were uncannily ready for them. Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh claimed that the Patriots filmed 30 minutes of the Rams’ final pregame walkthrough, and told Specter that.
Martz went on record for OTL‘s story, saying that Goodell panicked about Specter’s possible investigation, and asked him to release a statement asserting his confidence in the Spygate investigation, which he did because he also saw the threat a Congressional investigation would pose to the NFL. Martz released this statement, though he claims it was heavily doctored by the NFL, against his better judgment:
“It was hard to swallow because I always felt something happened but I didn’t know what it was and I couldn’t prove it anyway. Even to this day, I think something happened.”
- Specter’s investigation never got off the ground, and the NFL closed ranks, instituting specific policies that would threaten harsher penalties and more thorough investigations for future cheating in the manner of Spygate — setting the stage for the Deflategate showdown years later.
- Kraft only gained more power in the NFL after that, earning the nickname of “assistant commissioner” around the league because of his leading in union and TV negotiations and his closeness to Goodell.
- This closeness, and league-wide perception that the Patriots got off light for Spygate, is the image that Goodell fought against when he came down like a ton of bricks on the Patriots and Tom Brady for Deflategate. He was encouraged by other owners to “go hard” after the team, and it was the owners’ support that led Kraft to accept the penalties levied at the organization, even as he publicly defended Brady and supported his quarterback’s appeal.
- In Goodell’s zeal to deliver the “makeup call” of the Deflategate investigation, he seemingly made up the rules as he went along (a running theme of his tenure), rigging the deck so he could ensure a harsh punishment. It was that zeal that led to Brady’s appeal being upheld in federal court, which OTL points out made Goodell 0-5 in appeals that he didn’t hear himself. In other words, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction, and Goodell’s overstepping of his bounds produced the same result as the leniency of Spygate… a slap on the wrist for the Patriots, with Belichick (and Brady) escaping punishment.
The Patriots responded to this exhaustive piece with a categorical denial, claiming that Van Natta and Wickersham (and all of their sources, by extension) made it all up:
“The New England Patriots have never filmed or recorded another team’s practice or walkthrough. The first time we ever heard of such an accusation came in 2008, the day before Super Bowl XLII, when the Boston Herald reported an allegation from a disgruntled former employee. That report created a media firestorm that extended globally and was discussed incessantly for months.
“It took four months before that newspaper retracted its story and offered the team a front and back page apology for the damage done. Clearly, the damage has been irreparable. As recently as last month, over seven years after the retraction and apology was issued, ESPN issued the following apology to the Patriots for continuing to perpetuate the myth: ‘On two occasions in recent weeks, SportsCenter incorrectly cited a 2002 report regarding the New England Patriots and Super Bowl XXXVI. That story was found to be false, and should not have been part of our reporting. We apologize to the Patriots organization.’
“This type of reporting over the past seven years has led to additional unfounded, unwarranted and, quite frankly, unbelievable allegations by former players, coaches and executives. None of which have ever been substantiated, but many of which continue to be propagated. The New England Patriots are led by an owner whose well-documented efforts on league-wide initiatives – from TV contracts to preventing a work stoppage – have earned him the reputation as one of the best in the NFL.
“For the past 16 years, the Patriots have been led by one of the league’s all-time greatest coaches and one of its all-time greatest quarterbacks. It is disappointing that some choose to believe in myths, conjecture and rumors rather than giving credit for the team’s successes to Coach Belichick, his staff and the players for their hard work, attention to detail, methodical weekly preparation, diligence and overall performance.”
Keep digging that hole, Patriots. Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated has also published a piece delving into the Patriots’ history of spying and cheating, and league-wide awareness of it. But I’m sure they’re making it all up, too, right?
(Via ESPN)
