Has anything new come out in the last bit? PFT dropped the 19 teams take crazy precautions and that's the "latest" i have seen.
Great... Collinsworth always gets down on his knees for the Kraft cheese. He will be singing super bowl* praises and making excuses. ...Or become the latest cheater apologist defector.
Some of the money quotes (mostly the new stuff) from the ESPN article that every football fan should read. The basic theme is, the Patriots have been stealing games since 2000 and they got off easy with spygate. Some owners wanted Goodell to punish his friend Kraft harshly for Delfategate to make up for Spygate. Oh, and Kraft tried to bribe a US Senator through back channels. Looks like the Patriots are cheaters from the top down. The NFL should just disband the whole team, wipe them from the record books and be done with it. http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/13533995/split-nfl-new-england-patriots-apart "Goodell didn't want anybody to know that his gold franchise had won Super Bowls by cheating," a senior executive whose team lost to the Patriots in a Super Bowl now says. "If that gets out, that hurts your business." … The shared view of Belichick and Adams, according to many who've worked with them, is this: The league is lazy and incompetent, so why not push every boundary? "You'd want Bill and Ernie doing your taxes," says a former Patriots assistant coach. "They would find all the loopholes, and then when the IRS would close them, they'd find more." … 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. … Many former New England coaches and employees insist that the taping of signals wasn't even the most effective cheating method the Patriots deployed in that era. Several of them acknowledge that during pregame warm-ups, a low-level Patriots employee would sneak into the visiting locker room and steal the play sheet…Numerous former employees say the Patriots would have someone rummage through the visiting team hotel for playbooks or scouting reports. …. several former Patriots coaches insist that spying helped them most against less sophisticated teams -- the Dolphins and Bills chief among them -- whose coaches didn't bother changing their signals. …. Then the Patriots told the league officials they possessed eight tapes containing game footage…Goodell was contacted, and he ordered the tapes and notes to be destroyed, but the Patriots didn't want any of it to leave the building, arguing that some of it was obtained legally and thus was proprietary. So in a stadium conference room, Pash and the other NFL executives stomped the videotapes into small pieces and fed Adams' notes into a shredder … according to documents and sources, they recorded signals in at least 40 games during the Spygate era. …. The Patriots turned over what they turned over (in spygate), and the NFL accepted it. Sources with knowledge of the investigation insist that the Patriots were "borderline noncompliant." And a former high-level Patriots employee agrees, saying, "The way the Patriots tried to approach it, they tried to cover up everything," … "This is the way things should be done ... the way they were done under Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue," a former executive now says. "Keep the dirty laundry in the family." … The view around much of the league was that Goodell had done a major favor for Kraft, one of his closest confidants who had extended critical support when he became the commissioner the previous summer … "Why would they go to such great lengths for so long to do it (spygate) and hide it if it didn't work?" a longtime former executive says. "It made no sense.” … The Panthers now believe that their practices had been taped by the Patriots before Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004. "Our players came in after that first half and said it was like [the Patriots] were in our huddle," a Panthers source says. During halftime -- New England led 14-10 -- Carolina's offensive coordinator, Dan Henning, changed game plans because of worries the Patriots had too close a read on Carolina's schemes. And, in the second half, the Panthers moved the ball at will before losing 32-29 on a last-second field goal. "Do I have any tape to prove they cheated?" this source says. "No. But I'm convinced they did it." … Ward told reporters that Patriots inside information about Steelers play calling helped New England upset Pittsburgh 24-17 in the January 2002 AFC Championship Game. … "They knew the signals, so they knew when it went in what the coverage was and how to attack it," says a former Steelers coach. "I've had a couple of guys on my teams from New England, and they've told me those things." …. The Eagles suspected that either practices were filmed or a playbook was stolen. "To this day, some believe that we were robbed by the Patriots not playing by the rules ... and knowing our game plan," a former Eagles football operations staffer says. …. "I don't think fans really want to know this -- they just want to watch football," the Panthers source says. "But if you tell them that the games aren't on the level, they'll care. Boy, will they care." …. Goodell was asked how many tapes the league had reviewed, and destroyed, the previous September. "I believe there were six tapes," the commissioner replied, "and I believe some were from the preseason in 2007, and the rest were primarily in the late 2006 season." The Patriots had spied far more often than that, of course, but Specter didn't know it at the time. All he knew was that he didn't buy Goodell's explanation for destroying the tapes -- that he didn't want to create an uneven playing field. "You couldn't sell that in kindergarten," Specter said. …. Repeating what he had proclaimed publicly, Goodell assured Specter the destroyed tapes went back only to the 2006 season. But then he confessed something new: that the Patriots began their taping operation in 2000 and the destroyed notes were for games as early as 2002, "overwhelmingly for AFC East rivals," contradicting an assertion he made just two weeks earlier in public. The commissioner told Specter that among the destroyed notes were the Patriots' detailed diagrams of the Steelers' defensive signals from several games, including the January 2002 AFC Championship Game -- in which Ward later alleged that the Patriots called "our stuff out." …. "No valid reason to destroy," Specter wrote in his own notes. … In his 2012 book, "Life Among the Cannibals," Specter wrote that a powerful friend -- he wouldn't name the person -- told him that if he "laid off the Patriots," there could be a lot of money for him in Palm Beach. Specter told the friend, "I couldn't care less." …. one coach who worked with an assistant on that 2001 Patriots team says that the ex-Pats assistant coach once bragged that New England knew exactly what the Rams would call in the red zone. "He'd say, 'A little birdie told us,'" the coach says now. …. in his handwritten notes the day before, beneath Matt Walsh's name, Specter jotted the phrase, "Cover-up." … ON THE EXACT DAY that Specter called for an investigation, Goodell left a voice mail message on Mike Martz's cellphone….Martz recalls…He told me, 'The league doesn't need this. We're asking you to come out with a couple lines exonerating us and saying we did our due diligence,'" If it ever got to an investigation, it would be terrible for the league,”….in the end, Martz got in line. He wrote the statement that evening, and it was released the next day, reading in part that he was "very confident there was no impropriety" and that it was "time to put this behind us." Shown a copy of his statement this past July, Martz was stunned to read several sentences about Walsh that he says he's certain he did not write. "It shocked me," he says. "It appears embellished quite a bit -- some lines I know I didn't write. Who changed it? I don't know." Since Spygate broke, Martz says he has continued to hear things about the run-up to that Super Bowl. Goodell "told me to take him at his word," he says. "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." ….. No matter how angry owners and coaches were over Goodell's handling of Spygate, they were unified in their view that a congressional investigation posed a threat to the game itself. …. . Belichick's reputation was so tarnished that he worried that Spygate would come up during his Hall of Fame consideration, people who know him say. … It's not surprising that there's a makeup call," one team owner says. Another longtime executive says a number of owners wanted Goodell to "go hard on this one." … "Roger did the right thing -- at last," one owner said after Goodell upheld Brady's punishment. "He looks tough -- and that's good." "Pleased," said another longtime owner. "About time," an executive close to another owner said. "Overdue." "The world has never seen anyone as good as Roger Goodell as a political maneuverer. If he were in Congress, he'd be majority [leader]," one owner says …. It didn't matter that Berman only ruled on whether the league had followed the collective bargaining agreement, not on Brady's guilt or innocence. It didn't matter that the Patriots had accepted the league's punishment in May. For the second time in a less than a decade, in the eyes of some owners and executives, Goodell had the Patriots in his hands, and let them go.
With the stealing of the play sheet allegations, it would be interesting to see one of the stat heads produce an analysis of the patriots defense in the opening drive/quarter over the course of the 7 years vs. everyone else in that time frame. just a quick look at their first 3 SB runs: in their 9 playoff and SB games they never once gave up any points on their opponents opening drive. In only 3 of the 9 games were teams able to score anything at all in the first quarter (1 TD, 2 FGs). 6 Shut-out 1st Quarters and there is a noticeable difference between their 1st half defenses and their 2nd half defenses
The only thing positive to come out of this is that Kraft's lackey, Roger Goodell, should in all likelihood be through in the NFL. Fuck him kissing NE ass, it's over. Everyone who does not root for the Pats will always think of them as cheating scum. Pat fans will laugh and say we won, you're jealous. Nothing changes today.
I'm sure the statistics would be astoundingly damning in connection with the teams that scripted the plays in their initial possessions.
Since Spygate broke, Martz says he has continued to hear things about the run-up to that Super Bowl. Goodell "told me to take him at his word," he says. "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." But these masshole trolls have been claiming for years that Martz agreed with Goodell that there was no cheating in that Rams SB. Poof. _
I hate ESPN as much as everybody else here but I can't help but wonder why they would throw that little paragraph about sneaking into the locker room to steal the scripted plays 2700 words into the article. As much as I dislike them I can't help but think that was done intentionally and they are just waiting for somebody from the Patriots to scream bullshit and then parade out a few ex employees to verify the story. Of course I am probably dreaming but why else would they bury a bombshell like that so far down?
Fuck the footballs, lets talk about the text messages...were they made up? Or did they ACTUALLY call themselves the deflators and actually describe taking air out of the balls? Was that a dream I had?
Nice photo in the ESPN article showing the cheater exit here banner, little did I notice before a blog which can tell the pats your team cheats website to stfu http://belicheat.com
I have a few questions: -are the Patriots just truly terrible at cheating and always get caught or do they cheat in so many capacities and get away with most of it but since they have so many (deflated) balls in the air they can't keep track of them all and some things slip through the cracks? You have to think that for every scam they run there has to be a half dozen other shady things they are doing, but that's just me. -what is the breaking point for fans in NE? I get the blind morons who could watch Brady run over their own newborn, reverse and run over them again but still convince themselves he didn't do anything wrong but aren't there a portion of fans who are sick of this and either a) stop cheering for the team or b) want TB and BB gone and replaced with people with integrity? -what is the breaking point for the league to take significant action against this team? What do they have to do for real consequences to their actions? Will they ever have their titles stripped? Will TB and BB ever be kicked out of the league or barred from the HOF? What do they have to do to get to that level?
[QUOTE=" -what is the breaking point for the league to take significant action against this team? What do they have to do for real consequences to their actions? Will they ever have their titles stripped? Will TB and BB ever be kicked out of the league or barred from the HOF? What do they have to do to get to that level?[/QUOTE] I have said before, when people stop watching and stop paying because the NFL has become WWW then maybe they will take the action they should have taken 15 years ago. As long as the billions keep rolling in nobody really cares what they do.
Goodell- hey bob caught your guy cheating again. With all the bad press lately I gotta look tough on everyone. Kraft- no we aren't admitting to anything Goodell- oh remember how I did you a favor on spygate and got rid of the evidence of 40 game tapes(multiple seasons worth) Well now I'm calling in that favor. Just take the hit. Kraft- no were the patriots. Were gonna make you look stupid in court. Goodell(after ruling)- you could have just taken the hit but you made me look bad. I kept the file in my drawer for all these years just in case you betrayed me. With all the copies of what happened. Sent it straight to espn through back channels I imagine a similar conversation took place somewhere during the deflate scandal.
