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More trouble looming for Cheatriots.

Posted by Michael David Smith on September 8, 2015, 9:16 AM EDT
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...g ... any-years/


Just days after Tom Brady’s Deflategate suspension was overturned, new attention is being given on the earlier Patriots cheating scandal, known as Spygate.

An ESPN Outside the Lines report, citing interviews with more than 90 sources around the NFL, says that the Spygate cheating lasted “at least 40 games over a period of several seasons from 2000 to 2007,” and that the league never fully investigated all the accusations against the team.

According to the report, the taping of opponents’ signals reached the point where the Patriots had diagrams of the stolen signals that they could use during games.

The report also says that other teams were much more upset about the Patriots’ cheating than they let on, because NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell convinced the rest of the league not to press the issue. Former Rams coach Mike Martz, whose team lost to the Patriots in Belichick’s first Super Bowl, said he was pressured by a “panicked” Goodell to issue a statement saying he was satisfied by the league’s investigation of the Patriots. Martz said he agreed to go along with Goodell’s request to issue a statement backing the league not because he was completely satisfied by the investigation, but because Goodell convinced Martz that a prolonged scandal could badly damage the league.

Anyone who thought the Deflategate ruling was going to end any talk of the Patriots cheating is sorely mistaken. Both Deflategate and Spygate are stories that will have legs.

Barry Petchesky
Filed to: new england patriots9/08/15 10:20am

I want to hug and kiss this beautiful story from ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham and take it out to a fancy dinner. Splendidly reported and brutally damning of both the New England Patriots and Roger Goodell, it alleges that the Patriots’ Spygate scandal was worse than anyone imagined—and was actively swept under the rug by the commissioner and the NFL.

You should read the story immediately, but the thrust is this—citing interviews with 90 sources in and around football as well as primary documents, ESPN reports that Bill Belichick and the Patriots videotaped opposing teams’ signals from 40 different games from 2000 through 2007. And when the scandal broke, Goodell did everything in his power to protect Robert Kraft, who was one of his strongest supporters and without whom he would not have been named commissioner. The thesis statement in this story is that the cover-up—and if this report is accurate, the league’s actions can’t be called anything else but a cover-up—so rankled other owners that Goodell came down extra-hard on New England and Tom Brady for Ballghazi as “a makeup call.”

The Patriots’ defense for Spygate—when they were caught taping a Jets practice—has always been that it was an honest mistake, that they had misinterpreted the rules. Their track record implies otherwise. Belichick reportedly placed his complex spying program in the hands of Ernie Adams, the Patriots’ mysterious “director of football research.” It began way back in 2000, Belichick’s first year as New England coach, and only became more efficient as time went on.

As the Patriots became a dynasty and Belichick became the first coach to win three Super Bowls in four years, an entire system of covert videotaping was developed and a secret library created. “It got out of control,” a former Patriots assistant coach says. Sources with knowledge of the system say an advance scout would attend the games of upcoming Patriots opponents and assemble a spreadsheet of all the signals and corresponding plays. The scout would give it to Adams, who would spend most of the week in his office with the door closed, matching the notes to the tapes filmed from the sideline. Files were created, organized by opponent and by coach. During games, Walsh later told investigators, the Patriots’ videographers were told to look like media members, to tape over their team logos or turn their sweatshirt inside out, to wear credentials that said Patriots TV or Kraft Productions. The videographers also were provided with excuses for what to tell NFL security if asked what they were doing: Tell them you’re filming the quarterbacks. Or the kickers. Or footage for a team show.

Former Patriots coaches and employees say the videotaping was just the tip of the iceberg.

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. Walsh later told investigators that he was once instructed to remove the labels and erase tapes of a Patriots practice because the team had illegally used a player on injured reserve. At Gillette Stadium, the scrambling and jamming of the opponents’ coach-to-quarterback radio line — “small s—-” that many teams do, according to a former Pats assistant coach — occurred so often that one team asked a league official to sit in the coaches’ box during the game and wait for it to happen. Sure enough, on a key third down, the headset went out.

The Patriots’ taping apparently went undetected until 2006, when Packers security caught cameraman Matt Estrella filming illegally. (He claimed he was merely taking scenic shots for “Kraft Productions.”) That offseason, the NFL warned the Patriots in writing. Before the next year’s opener the Jets set up a sting operation, with the assistance of team and NFL security, to catch the Patriots in the act.

They caught Estrella filming, and actively trying to hide his employer.

During the first half, Jets security monitored Estrella, who held a camera and wore a polo shirt with a taped-over Patriots logo under a red media vest that said: NFL PHOTOGRAPHER 138. With the backing of Jets owner Woody Johnson and Tannenbaum, Jets security alerted NFL security, a step Mangini acknowledged publicly later that he never wanted. Shortly before halftime, security encircled and then confronted Estrella. He said he was with “Kraft Productions.”

That’s when the NFL stepped in, and by all accounts, never had any interest in anything other than making it all go away.

On Monday, the day after the game, the tape arrived at NFL headquarters. On Wednesday, Goodell spoke to Belichick over the phone, and the Pats coach assured the commissioner he had misinterpreted the rules and that it was a small mistake that didn’t give the team a significant edge. In this conversation, according to ESPN’s sources, Goodell “did not believe” the Patriots’ explanation, but did not press for details. “Goodell didn’t want to know how many games were taped,” another source said.

On Thursday, the NFL announced the Patriots punishment. The entire official investigation had taken three days.

Privately, the NFL continued to act. The next week the league dispatched three executives, including general counsel Jeff Pash, to Foxborough. There they obtained eight videotapes of opposing teams and a stack of documents containing notes on other teams’ signals. Goodell ordered all the evidence to be destroyed.

This part of the report is unimpeachable—it comes directly from the Patriots’ counsel.

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. Yet almost as quickly as the tapes and notes were found, they were destroyed, on Goodell’s orders: League executives stomped the tapes into pieces and shredded the papers inside a Gillette Stadium conference room.

Jeff Pash stomped the tapes!

The next step was to get the controversy to blow over. Coaches and executives from the Steelers (who believed they had been taped prior to their 2002 AFC championship loss) and Eagles (the 2005 Super Bowl) put out public statements denying that the spying had anything to do with the games’ outcomes and supporting the NFL’s investigation. We do not know if they were pressured to do so, but former Rams coach Mike Martz says Roger Goodell called him personally and urged him to do the same regarding the 2002 Super Bowl.

During a five-minute conversation, Martz recalls that the commissioner sounded panicked about Specter’s calls for a wider investigation. Martz also recalls that Goodell asked him to write a statement, saying that he was satisfied with the NFL’s Spygate investigation and was certain the Patriots had not cheated and asking everyone to move on — like leaders of the Steelers and Eagles had done.

“He told me, ‘The league doesn’t need this. We’re asking you to come out with a couple lines exonerating us and saying we did our due diligence,’” says Martz.

Martz believes the statement he gave was later changed by the NFL before being released.

Shown a copy of his statement this past July, Martz was stunned to read several sentences about Walsh that he says he’s certain he did not write. “It shocked me,” he says. “It appears embellished quite a bit — some lines I know I didn’t write. Who changed it? I don’t know.”

With the NFL’s power brokers in lockstep, the league managed to avoid a congressional investigation. It appeared to be the end of things, but, apparently, not in the minds of the other owners.

ESPN’s interviews with owners and executives paint a picture of an NFL as resentful of the Patriots’ special treatment as they were jealous of the team’s onfield success. So when the Patriots were accused of illegally deflating footballs—an overblown scandal if there ever was one—Goodell decided to bring down the hammer. The massive investigation, the unprecedented penalties, the preemptive court filing? All were apparently efforts to assuage other owners sick and tired of the Patriots getting away with things. One NFL owner declared Goodell’s heavy-handed response was his “makeup call.”

Ballghazi looks very different in this context. Not merely the NFL’s usual clownish mishandling, it’s the culmination of 15 years of the Patriots bending and breaking the rules, and of pent-up acrimony accrued by Goodell’s chummy relationship with Kraft. The NFL, attempting to trump up the charges against Tom Brady, relied largely on his destruction of evidence—a tactic, it turns out, with which the league’s investigators had firsthand familiarity.

And after all that, the NFL couldn’t even get it to stick.

The Patriots have issued a statement in response to ESPN’s report. It manages to sound strong and deny nothing.

This one deserves it's own topic: http://cover32.com/rams/2015/09/08/bomb ... owl-xxxvi/

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/20 ... ts-spying/

Report: Most teams take extra precautions to combat Patriots’ spying

Posted by Michael David Smith on September 8, 2015, 11:41 AM EDT

When it rains, it pours.

The Patriots are finding that out the hard way this morning, as for the second time a major investigative piece has accused the team of widespread cheating. First there was ESPN’s investigation revisiting Spygate. And now comes a Sports Illustrated report that also says there’s a perception in the NFL that the Patriots routinely break the rules to gather information about the opposition.

According to the report, at least 19 NFL teams — most of the league — have confirmed that they took precautions against the Patriots that they didn’t take against any other opponent, because they were more concerned about spying when they faced the Patriots than they were when they faced any other opponent. Steps teams have taken against the Patriots include running fake plays during walk-through practices in case the Patriots were spying, not leaving anything sensitive in the trash at their hotels in New England, declining the Patriots’ offer to use their facilities, blocking off the visitors’ locker room at Gillette Stadium to keep Patriots employees out, sweeping for bugs, and telling the Patriots’ visiting locker room manager to leave because they didn’t trust him not to spy.

One team told Sports Illustrated that it butted heads with the Patriots over locking the doors to the visitors’ locker room, with the Patriots telling them they couldn’t because it’s a fire code violation, and the team telling the Patriots to go ahead and report them to the fire chief if they wanted, but that the visitors’ locker room doors would be locked. (Patriots spokesman Stacey James denies that ever happened.)

Both the ESPN report and the Sports Illustrated report suggest that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was determined to crack down on the Patriots for Deflategate in part because many teams think Goodell failed to come down hard enough on the Patriots for Spygate. Goodell denies that. But there’s no denying the perception around the league that the Patriots are cheaters.

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/ ... c8574.html

Martz drops Spygate bombshell in ESPN investigation



By Ben Frederickson

It's been a rough stretch for the NFL, and former St. Louis Rams coach Mike Martz is the latest to pile on.

The 64-year-old came off the top rope from his summer cabin in Idaho.

Deflategate, meet Spygate.

ESPN's "Outside the Lines" on Tuesday published an exhaustive investigation that indicates the Patriots' Spygate scandal went deeper than everyone thought. So deep, in fact, that league investigators reportedly discovered a Patriots library full of scouting material, opponents' play calls included.

Think that might have helped the Patriots beat the Rams 20-17 in the 2002 Super Bowl?

Martz, who coached the Rams from 2000-05, told ESPN in July that NFL commissioner Rodger Goodell called him in 2008 and asked him to provide a statement saying he was satisfied with the league's investigation into Spygate. At the time, U.S. Sen. Arlen Spector was pushing for a congressional investigation into the matter. Martz was the offensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers.

"He (Goodell) told me, 'The league doesn't need this. We're asking you to come out with a couple lines exonerating us and saying we did our due diligence,'" Martz recalled to ESPN.

But wait. There's more.

When ESPN showed Martz his statement, he didn't recognize it.

"It shocked me," Martz told ESPN. "It appears embellished quite a bit -- some lines I know I didn't write. Who changed it? I don't know."

Would the NFL put words in the mouth of one its coaches?

Martz doesn't sound like a guy who trusts the NFL.

"It was hard to swallow because I always felt something happened but I didn't know what it was and I couldn't prove it anyway," he told ESPN. "Even to this day, I think something happened."

There's a lot to digest here. Here's a link to the ESPN story: "Spygagte to Deflategate: Inside what split the NFL and the Patriots Apart"

I dont know what to think about this. If the NFL went that route you'd think they might pressure some teams to give the guy a job...

I'm not surprised. The amount of money in the NFL makes it almost certain cheating goes on. I wouldn't be surprised to find out games are fixed.
Ram fans know the patriots cheated to win the superbowl game with the Rams. I read a post on another forum, someone went back and looked at the amount of fumbles each team had in the last ten years. The Patriots had the fewest. the next team had almost twice as many. Makes you wonder just how long they've been deflating balls. deflated balls are easier to hold onto. I don't believe its a coincidence. Patriot cheating started when Billecheck was hired.
If the owners had any balls they'd fire Goodell, and reopen spygate.

I'm more than convinced of the Patriots' cheating but am being illuminated to just how much Goodell has enabled Kraft and Co. I used to think that the cover-up was in an effort to protect the shield but I now think this is more about actual crime. Sure, Goodell and Kraft are buddies so that's in there too but this is about the mob or somebody making a LOT of money on bets. That always seemed a little too convenient or obvious but that's all it really boils down to.

For me, I'm worn down. I don't really need to re-hash all of this stuff even though I'm learning new things. My hope is that everyone who isn't a Rams fan(and even some Rams fans) will take Spygate more seriously and investigate it further. Question it. Question the Patriots. I'm skeptical that the Patriots get what they deserve but there's always hope.

Just finished reading the article. I don't know about you guys, but that super bowl was probably the most gut wrenching loss I'd ever have to experience. I'm thinking congressional hearing is in order. I also wouldn't mind if the following were to occur as well:

- Bill Bellicheck banned for life
- all 4 Patriot Super Bowl titles stripped, given to runner up team.
- All NFL/Super Bowl awards (including MVP) of any Patriot players from 1999 to present stripped
- all Patriot draft picks stripped for 2016
- no games on tv except to local market

Not entirely certain of what Kraft's involvement has been so I haven't really thought of a punishment for him yet.

I'd at least like them to give up the Lombardi in those games where cheating can be proved. By the tone of that article, 2002 seems likely to have been conflicted. The Rams got screwed and everyone knew it. I always thought that it got swept under the rug. I'm glad that we are getting another shot at some vindication and more so that the Pat's legacy just went down the tarnish tunnel.