Spygate: Final Verdict.

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. 

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