Spygate: Investigating the Patriots Eight Year Advantage

For the better part of six months, and with greater frequency in recent weeks, the New England Patriots’ spygate scandal has been front page sports news.

There has been talk of a cover-up. The NFL seems to be in the process of making some kind of immunity deal with former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh.

There have even been government inquiries into the spygate incident and the alleged cover-up that ensued.

If you didn’t know that you were reading the sports pages, it would appear that the government and the NFL were trying to take down some kind of organized crime syndicate.

The whole spygate scandal seems to be spiraling out of control. Cover-ups, government involvement, and immunity deals all read like something straight out of a crime novel.

With all the attention and gossip surrounding the scandal, we should not forget the severity of the Patriots’ and Bill Belichick’s actions.

Taping other team’s defensive signals and possibly even other team’s practices is no small infraction. This is an action that could have given the Patriots an immense advantage over the past 8 years.

Head coaches, offensive coordinators, quarterbacks, and anyone else in an organization that is involved with running a team’s offense spend countless hours studying game tapes and desperately trying to gain even some semblance of an insight into what the opposing team’s defense might throw at them.

The Patriots have been head and shoulders above all other teams in the NFL in terms of gaining an insight into an opposing team’s defense.

Just imagine being an offensive coordinator or quarterback and knowing exactly what the opposing team’s defense was going to do on each play.

Imagine knowing exactly when the blitz was coming.

Imagine knowing when they were going to put double coverage on a receiver.

Imagine knowing whether the safety was going to blitz of drop back into coverage.

Imagine knowing, for the most part, what everyone on the opposing team’s defense was going to do before the play even started.

That is the advantage the Patriots have had over the past eight years. Any illegal (in terms of NFL rules) action that gives a team that kind of advantage over that length of time is extreme breach of the game’s rules and should be investigated from every angle.

With the excitement building around the spygate scandal, it is easy to lose sight of the severity of what actually occurred.

It is easy to become engulfed in this high profile investigation and lose track of exactly why this investigation is so utterly important to the game of football.

The New England Patriots had a massive advantage over other teams for eight years.

This is something that fans and particularly the NFL should not take lightly.

The Patriots actions breached the NFL’s rules, but they also breached integrity of the game and the trust that every NFL fan has that they are seeing a fair and honest game and that the victorious team was truly the best team on the field that particular day.