Spygate: Final Verdict.

By Derek Lofland

I’ve been holding off on writing an article about “Spygate” since reports surfaced days before the Super Bowl that former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh had taped a Rams’ walk-through prior to Super Bowl XXXVI.

I wanted to see what new information came out of this, which quite frankly wasn’t much. Now that Matt Walsh has met with the Commissioner and the tapes have been shown to the public, what is the final effect of Spygate on the Patriots' legacy?
  
The problem that we have on this topic is that there are too many people who are emotionally attached to the situation.

You have a number of fans who are huge supporters of the Patriots. They believe this is an attempt by fans of other franchises to discredit the accomplishments of the most successful franchises in the league since 2001. They believe giving this matter any credence is pure jealousy.

Conversely, you have another group of people who hate the Patriots so much that they will take any bit of negative information and use it to discredit the entire Patriot dynasty. They want to believe the Patriots were a 6-10 team transformed into a Super Bowl Champion with this conduct.

The fact of the matter is that both positions are utterly ridiculous. Many Patriots fans have lost their minds in trying to justify or explain this. It was against the rules and if the Patriots didn’t know it was against the rules, the only reason they didn’t know is because they didn’t want to know. Blind eye, anyone?

The method they were using to tape these games was very systematic. On every play, they would tape the scoreboard showing the clock, score, down, and yardage. Then they would show the signals being used by the coaching staff on the other sideline. They had done this practice as early as 2001.

Common sense dictates two things:

1. In a league where coaches spend 15-20 hours a day preparing for their opponent, why would they use those valuable hours viewing footage that didn’t give them any advantage?

2. If it wasn’t working, why did they continue to tape opposing sidelines from 2001-2007?

It obviously gave them an advantage; otherwise they wouldn’t have gone through the painstaking systematic approach in taping these signals over multiple seasons. If it weren’t a competitive advantage, the league wouldn’t have fined the Patriots $250,000. They wouldn’t have taken away a first-round pick nor fined “The Hood” $500,000.

However, the anti-Patriot crowd has also lost their minds. First, do you honestly believe the Patriots were the only team in the league engaged in this activity?  In reading and watching TV about this topic, I have heard two interesting stories on ESPN from unconfirmed sources:

1. There was another team in the league that had tried to tape coaching signals. When the opposing coaching staff saw what was going on, they sent a huge security officer to stand in front of the camera to block the taping.

2. When Herm Edwards was with the Jets, he knew the Patriots were engaged in this behavior and would wave to the cameras to let the Patriots know that he knew the signals were being taped.

Opposing coaches who had no idea their signals were being taped were naive. I have a very difficult time believing that the Patriots were the only team engaged in this type of activity and that no one in the league had the foggiest notion that the Patriots were taping signals. Teams that were playing the Patriots should have known this practice was going on and could have taken measures to prevent it or minimize it.

If I been the coach of the Patriots and put together a game plan based on those signals, the Patriots would have gone 0-16. I am a follower of the game, have very strong opinions on what I watch, and consider myself a historian of the game. I can call plays on John Madden Football. That does not qualify me as an NFL Head Coach.

Taking steroids will make someone stronger, but it doesn’t guarantee they will have the hand-eye coordination to hit a 95-mile an hour fastball. The same is true for this argument.

Taping signals is not going to make an unqualified head coach smart enough to win three Super Bowls. Had the Patriots done the same exact practice with The Ole Ball Coach running the helm, they wouldn’t have won three Super Bowls. They probably wouldn’t have won more than six or seven games a season.

But when you take the best head coach in the NFL and the best quarterback in the NFL and arm them with a competitive advantage, it can have a huge impact...a dominating one.

You can’t take the dynasty part away from the Patriots. They won three Super Bowls in four years and appeared in four Super Bowls in seven years. What happened has happened. The past is in the past. You can’t take away the impressive record of Bill Belichick and what he has been able to accomplish in Boston since 2001. You can’t take away Brady’s postseason record.

Where it does hurt both of them is in their climb to join as Muhammad Ali called, “The Legends Club.”  In the Thanksgiving Special that Fox Sports did for Brett Favre last year where they had Ripken Jr., Gretzky, Bird, Staubach and a slew of other legends congratulate Brett Favre on his wonderful career, the tribute ended with Ali saying, “I am the Greatest, you are the Latest. Welcome to the Legends Club.”

The Hood and Brady are no longer playing to be the best in the game right here, right now. They are playing to become legends. The best of the best. All-time greats. No one can deny that Bill Belichick is a better coach than Marty Schottenheimer. But is he a better coach than Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi, Chuck Noll, or Don Shula?

When you start debating which legend is better than another legend, you really start splitting hairs.

If someone tries to say The Hood is a better head coach than Tom Landry, it will be pointed that while The Hood does have three rings to Landry’s two rings, that Landry had a longer tenure, won with more quarterbacks, appeared in just as many Super Bowls, and that in the two Super Bowl games he lost to the Steelers by four points, he didn’t tape the signals of Chuck Noll to get a competitive edge.

For Bill Belichick, this is damning. While it will probably not keep him out of the Hall of Fame or joining the legends of the game it is going to rob him of a chance to be considered at the very top of the head coaching fraternity.

While the first paragraph of his one-page biography will speak to his incredible winning percentage, postseason record, and Super Bowl rings the second paragraph is going to talk about this scandal. When everyone in that fraternity has so many impressive accomplishments it is going to be hard to take someone who was convicted of cheating and give them the gold medal.

In order for him to receive that gold medal, he is going to have to outdistance himself from everyone else so there is little argument, similar to what Jerry Rice did at the receiver position.

With regards to Tom Brady it gets harder to figure out the effect on his legacy. Here is someone that benefited from the information that probably didn’t know how it was obtained. It isn’t as if he was doing the videotaping or even ordering it. While it is unclear as to what extent the players knew anything about this, my belief is that they didn’t and the reason would be free agency and coaching staff changes.

If every player and assistant coach on the Patriots knew about this practice, how would it have stayed quiet for seven years with all the players and staff switching teams? You can’t tell me that when Ty Law was released from the Patriots that he wouldn’t have ratted The Hood out to the league had he known what was going on.
The problem is that while Brady probably didn’t know that he was being given this information against the rules and ethics of the league, the fact is that he benefited from that information. In a league that is decided by about five or 10 plays, it is hard to know how much that affected playoff games between two talented opponents.

So again, obviously Brady is better than Ryan Leaf, Rex Grossman, or Phillip Rivers. But in an argument about whether he is better than Elway, Favre, Manning, Montana, Starr, or Unitas, this topic is going to come up.

The difference is that instead of being in the second paragraph of Brady’s one page bio it will be in the fifth or sixth paragraph. It will be less damaging.  Not as many experts will jump on board with that argument, because many people will say it was not his fault and was out of his control. 

However, I can’t believe that it won’t ever come up in that discussion and I think there are some legitimate arguments to be made about how much this practice impacted Tom Brady’s career, not so much in terms of regular-season statistics, but in regards to his incredible winning percentage in both the regular season and postseason.

Patriot fans will argue that their team had the best talent and they would have won those games anyway. Other fans will argue that the Patriots wouldn’t have won any Super Bowls. It is hard for me to believe that.

I don’t believe the Patriots would have been 5-11 all those years. I think they were a playoff team regardless of their videotaping practices. I even believe they would have won at least one Super Bowl. But in so many playoff games that were decided by seven points or less did it change the outcome of any of those playoff games? I don’t know, and no one has an answer for that.

That is why I believe the NFL destroyed those videotapes after the first batch was turned over. They didn’t want the media and the fans to see the exact details of what the Patriots were doing. The Patriots have been one of the most successful franchises in the NFL this decade. In my opinion, the NFL was trying to minimize the damage done by this unfair practice.

It does them no good to have their most successful team, head coach, and quarterback tarnished by this. However, once the Walsh tapes came out they had little choice to release them without fueling the conspiracy theories that were out there about those tapes. The consequences of not showing them would have been much worse.

What is your opinion on this matter? Based on the facts we know now and assuming that there are no other new facts that will come to fruition, how does this affect your view of the 2000 Patriots' legacy?  Does it put an asterisk next to it, tarnish their accomplishments, become a small footnote, or should it have no effect at all.  I would like to hear your thoughts.

Derek Lofland is the NFL senior director at Fantasy Football Maniaxs.