Someone at ESPN wants to be fired.
Someone at ESPN, if my friend is correct, may not be living much longer.
In what might well be the final salvo before Outside the Lines is completely discontinued, OTL has just blown the doors off the last 15 years of the NFL, at least with respect to the New England Patriots.
In what can politely be called a bombshell only 48 hours before the Patriots are supposed to raise their fourth (illegal) championship banner (and we can now ignore what I said earlier -- all four titles are now completely reversible), ESPN just basically took Patriots Nation and eviscerated them on Spygate.
It was FAR MORE than anything people could've imagined. Worse yet, it is now clear that the first three titles were clean orchestrations from the league, as OTL found significant evidence that the Commissioner's Office was part of a cover-up to protect the league's rosy relationship with the Patriots and owner Robert Kraft.
A large-scale story is being published in the September 28, 2015 ESPN The Magazine, the contents to be found at this ESPN link.
A senior executive for either the Rams, Eagles, or Panthers said it best:
"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."
This just after the report announced it's first bombshell, confirming something many paying attention to the situation already knew: The NFL openly was destroying evidence implicating the Patriots...
"Goodell tried to assuage his bosses: He ordered the destruction of the tapes and notes, he insisted, so they couldn't be exploited again. Many in the room didn't believe it. And some would conclude it was as if Goodell, Kraft and Belichick had acted like partners, complicit in trying to sweep the scandal's details under the rug while the rest of the league was left wondering how much glory the Patriots' cheating had cost their teams."
The sickest irony of this whole exercise is: If the league was taking part in the situation, any criminality or other legal tort the Patriots would've committed in this circumstance becomes immune, due to the very lawsuit Spygate spawned: Mayer v. Belichick, New England Patriots, and National Football League -- in which the judge gave an absolute blank check to the sports leagues of this country, in that, regardless of the truth of the claims, no fan had any money or other legal recourse if the sports league chose to rig or otherwise manipulate their contests or procedures.
Seven years later, Robert Kraft would throw his benefactor under the bus, after a suspension which many now call a "makeup call" for fucking the entire league over for Spygate, the now-reversed four-game suspension of Tom Brady for his role in the deflation of footballs.
The article would note that: "Goodell deemed the Patriots and Brady "guilty of conduct detrimental to the integrity of, and public confidence in, the game of football," the league's highest crime, and punished the franchise and its marquee player."
Roger Goodell, you motherfucking piece of shit. THEY'VE BEEN DOING THAT FOR FIFTEEN YEARS NOW!!!
I'm not even sure the David $tern/Foolish and Wretched Ballhog relationship was that long!
The only people who have any belief of integrity or public confidence in the game of football are too stupid to be any more than sheep to the slaughter -- a nation full of fucking dullards who don't understand that the game kills people, or, more correctly, the sport is killing puppets on strings pulled by Goodell and other relevant parties at their whim!
Outside the Lines, in association with ESPN the Magazine, found, after interviewing:
"... more than 90 league officials, owners, team executives and coaches, current and former Patriots coaches, staffers and players, and reviews of previously undisclosed private notes from key meetings, show that Spygate is the centerpiece of a long, secret history between Goodell's NFL, which declined comment for this story, and Kraft's Patriots."
And, as such: "It was, one owner says, time for "a makeup call."
... which is utterly ridiculous on it's face. How a sports commissioner allows the Patriots to play in the Super Bowl when they knew that these kind of incidents had all-but-certainly occurred within SIX HOURS of the playing of the AFC Championship Game is beyond any sense of my personal comprehension.
And it isn't a matter, simply, of "The Show Must Go On": The game could've "gone on" with Seahawks vs. Colts just as easily.
There is no "makeup call" here. It is clear that the office of the Commissioner, either acting on it's own as The League or perhaps with a relationship to the Federal government (the latter has been my standing position -- the former was actually convincingly stated to me by my anonymous friend yesterday over this article!), has coddled, protected, aided, and abetted the New England Patriots in conduct which would be criminal culpability and civil liability if the sports leagues of this country did not have the absolute blank check Mayer provides for them.
Matt Walsh, a key figure in the Spygate investigation, was found to have first been involved in the illegal taping of signals in the 2000 preseason against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This would've been their fourth of five pre-season games, and their first home preseason game of the year. They would play Tampa again two weeks later in Week 1. For the record, they lost both games. However, the taping of the signals did lead to the ability of the backup quarterback of the Patriots to shadow the Tampa Bay coaching staff and alert the Patriot coaches to the defensive plays being called.
(Oh, the irony!!! The knowledge of audible signals appears, though more an act of omission on Oakland's part for Super Bowl XXXVII, to be exactly how the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Super Bowl in between New England's first two robberies.)
But this was Belichick's first year as the head coach and, according to Pro Football Reference, de facto general manager of the Patriots. Belichick employed one Ernie Adams as a "football research director" -- a position unique in the NFL, no other team having it. Belichick had known Adams for three decades. When the two were in Cleveland, the owner of the team offered $10,000 to anyone who could actually tell him Adams' job description!
Belichick basically banked his future in the NFL on cheating the living fuck out of the sport, and endangering a number of players (as I will explain later!):
"Belichick, almost five years after being fired by the Browns and fully aware that this was his last best shot as a head coach, placed an innovative system of cheating in the hands of his most trusted friend."
The investigation showed this process blossomed into a massive covert operation on the part of the Patriots, using video, spreadsheets, scouting personnel, etc. -- all in a manner of "football research" which went well above and beyond the rules allowed by the National Football League. Parties involved were even coached as to how to address NFL Security if they were approached about what they were doing!
Usually of defensive signals (though there was the occasional offensive signal/quarterback audible signal involved), the process:
"....would usually include three shots: the down and distance, the signal, and, as an in-house joke, a tight shot of a cheerleader's top or skirt. The tape was then often edited, sources say, so that Adams' copy contained only the signals, in rapid fire, one after another."
The next bombshell comes immediately after: The Patriots would, as a matter of course, often sign a defensive player who had been cut from a future opponent. His only task was to be placed in front of the football research director and divulge their signals. At least one such player said that at least half the signals could be immediately discerned.
The signals would be watched by Adams and the information directly relayed to Brady and Belichick.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have just found out the "greatness" of Tom Brady. Seriously.
Tom Brady's entire NFL legacy has been based on one cheat after another.
And then the next bombshell is even worse: Most of the remaining New England coaches don't even believe that was the most effective skullduggery the Patriots used -- and the information taken has wide-ranging implications:
"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, listing the first 20 or so scripted calls for the opposing team's offense. (The practice became so notorious that some coaches put out fake play sheets for the Patriots to swipe.) Numerous former employees say the Patriots would have someone rummage through the visiting team hotel for playbooks or scouting reports."
So not only did they steal the play sheets, but the other teams KNEW they were stealing the play sheets, and we find this out in 2015?????
My anonymous friend made a tremendous point about this particular exercise when I was talking about this particular claim: This has implications far beyond match-fixing. Player safety becomes an issue. If I know the first 20 plays the opposing team is going to run, I know (within a much smaller margin of error than usual) where every player for your team is and when. This makes it much easier to find opportunities for defensive players to "blow up" (read: injure) offensive players during these first 20 plays.
It is also alleged that the Patriots did what is claimed many teams did in this era: Jammed and scrambled the coach-to-quarterback radio feed that was used to directly communicate between the two at Foxboro Stadium -- but only, of course, for the visiting quarterback!!! And the NFL knew of this practice too, because teams were calling in the league to monitor that feed -- which would go out on key plays.
The article then turns to the league itself, claiming that much of the competition committee's time for SIX SOLID SEASONS was centered on Belichick, Adams, and the Patriots! By 2006, it is well known that basically everything was on the table, with the Patriots even being caught at nonconference opponents like Green Bay, leading to scrubbing the locker rooms for bugged devices! But it was teams the Patriots coaches felt were stupid where the cheating was most effective, which included two of their three division rivals:
"Looking back on it, 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. Even when they had the perfect play teed up, sometimes the system would fail, owing to human error. Several opposing coaches now say they wish they had messed with Belichick's head the way he had messed with theirs. You want to tape signals? Fine. We'll have three guys signaling plays and disguise it so much that Ernie Adams has to waste an entire day trying to decode them, then change them all when we play."
It was the third division rival, Eric Mangini's Jets, where we would all begin to learn about the truth about the Patriots. As is well known, the first game of the 2007 season was against the Jets, and, by this time, coach Mangini knew well of the illegal processes of the Patriots. Two years previous, he bolted the Patriots for the Jets, angering Belichick for obvious reasons -- not only was Mangini bolting for a division rival, but Mangini knew where a lot of Belichick's tricks, both legal and illegal -- both on and off the field!
Mangini actually devised a system in which three different coaches would send in signals, but only one signal would tell them which coach actually had the correct play!
And yet, the Patriots were still taping during the game, the Jets and NFL Security catching an "NFL PHOTOGRAPHER 138" for "Kraft Productions" -- a Matt Estrella -- and confiscating his camera.
Spygate was now placed in the national crosshairs. What followed has been a pattern of obfuscation, misdirection, and outright criminal conspiracy by the National Football League to protect not only the league itself, but it's Most Favored Franchise, ever since.
I'm going to split this article here, because we now enter the second phase: The exposition of a criminal conspiracy within the National Football League to protect a franchise which had a status far beyond the league at this point -- it was the centerpiece of a propaganda campaign both for the glorification of football and the glorification of America in a time of War on Terror.
The New England Patriots should've been expelled from the National Football League for these acts. There is no other reasonable penalty which should've been invoked.
But just a matter of looking at the facts, simply from 2001-2002 to 2006-2007, since the situation blew up in the first game of 2007.
The Patriots, in this known period:
- Had all six seasons be winning ones
- Made the playoffs five times, winning the AFC East all five years (the one year they didn't was a year the NFL was trying to "makeup call" for both Jon Gruden and the Raiders after the Tuck Rule debacle!)
- Won three Super Bowls
- Made the AFC title game a fourth time
And now, Roger Goodell had to cover their asses.
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