Maybe the New England Patriots aren’t at fault for Deflategate. Maybe team employees went completely rogue while taking the air out of footballs, and maybe Tom Brady was indeed — despite being a typically meticulous, control freak of a quarterback — somehow oblivious to those shenanigans.
Or maybe the Patriots were innocent across the board and the allegations were false and the they fired two employees for no reason and there was no fire where there was smoke.
But why, considering all of the allegations launched against them elsewhere and in the past, should anyone give the Patriots an enormous benefit of the doubt here?
This is, after all, a franchise that was already docked a first-round draft pick as a result of cheating allegations. In that case, they were disciplined for videotaping the signals from opposing coaches. The Pats were also accused for taping the St. Louis Rams’ walkthrough ahead of Super Bowl XXXVI, although that report was retracted by the Boston Herald.
Still, you’ve got two different “gates” within one era, and now you’ve got further damning details via ESPN and Sports Illustrated.
The report from ESPN reveals that the Patriots appeared to be spying for years, and using unique and shady methods to accomplish that:
Inside a room accessible only to Belichick and a few others, they found a library of scouting material containing videotapes of opponents’ signals, with detailed notes matching signals to plays for many teams going back seven seasons. Among them were handwritten diagrams of the defensive signals of the Pittsburgh Steelers, including the notes used in the January 2002 AFC Championship Game won by the Patriots 24-17.
[…]
At least two teams had caught New England videotaping their coaches’ signals in 2006, yet the league did nothing. Further, NFL competition committee members had, over the years, fielded numerous allegations about New England breaking an array of rules. Still nothing.
The ESPN report also cited multiple teams as suggesting the Pats had low-level employees sneak into opposing locker rooms in order to steal play sheets, which is almost hard to fathom. And again, we aren’t talking about one particular team with an ax to grind or one disgruntled former employee here.
And from SI, it gets worse:
At various times over the last decade, at least 19 NFL franchises took precautions against the Patriots that they didn’t take against any other opponent, people who worked for those teams told SI. Those concerns have not waned in the eight years that have passed since the Spygate scandal. The list of safeguards is long and varied. Teams commonly clear out trash cans in their hotel meeting rooms in New England because they believe the Patriots go through them. One longtime head coach said he ran fake plays in his Saturday walkthroughs at Gillette Stadium because he thought the Patriots might be spying on his team. Another team has taken things further: It fled Gillette and found a different place to practice, and on game day it piled trunks of equipment against the double doors in the back of the visitors’ locker room so nobody could get in. That same team kicked the visiting locker room manager out of the office he occupies near the clubhouse.
Look, I understand that Pats fans will smugly declare that critics are hating ’em because they ain’t em, but that doesn’t serve as a righteous defense when you consider that teams that have experienced relatively similar levels of recent success — the Steelers and Colts, for example — have managed to avoid having these types of pitchforks thrown their way.
To steal a line from Ted Wells’ controversial report on potential deflation, it’s more probable than not that the Patriots have bent the rules in various ways in order to get ahead. And while a lot of the reports regarding those incidents can’t identify smoking guns in isolation, the wide array is enough to cause me to conclude within the court of public opinion that the Patriots are crooked cheaters.
