No

by Michael Daly

Created on: June 23, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

It may be the longest and most maddening controversy in pro sports. Videogate, Spygate, call it what you will, it is a controversy that refuses to go away because a lot of people won't let it go away. Most recently a US Senator, Arlen Specter, entered the fray by publically questioning the integrity of the NFL' hanling of the issue. He was right, but for the wrong reasons.

The passage of time has clarified some of the contentiousness involved, but the fundamentals remain and in the process one has found reasons to raise doubts about Comissioner Roger Goodell. The controversy stems from the practice by the Patriots of taping opposing coaches from game sidelines. Much has been made about a memo sent out by the NFL days before the 2007 season began, a memo warning teams not to tape opposing sidelines. Lost in the entire controversy is a fundamental point best made by sports law professor Jeffrey Standen - Goodell's memo grossly misstated the rule in question.

The rule in question has been misstated ad nauseum by the mainstream media since the controversy first erupted. Taping opposing coaches and signals from sidelines is not barred by the NFL rulebook or league bylaws, and the whole controversy about "stealing signals" is stupid to begin with because signals are being flashed in the open - there is nothing sacrosanct about them; what is barred is in-game use of such tape, which is not practical to start with as turnaround time needed to break down recently shot footage is to great to make any use of it; claims to the contrary by former player Mark Schlereth are laughably inaccurate.

Where this controversy became a circus lay in a perfect storm of league-wide jealousy of Bill Belichick and the arrogant clumsiness of Goodell. Goodell dragooned the Patriots into handing over tapes they hadshot along with related notes; when one tape was leaked to Jay Glazer of FOX Sports (whose parent company employs Goodell's wife Jane Skinner), the embarassment of inability to secure such items led to their destruction. But the Mainstream Media, campaigning to lynch Bill Belichick, didn't let the issue die, they just let it stay on the back burner until Superbowl XLII when the NY Times and Boston Herald published stories about former videographer Matt Walsh and assertion that the Patiots had illegally taped the pre-game walkthrough of the St. Louis Rams beore Superbowl XXXVI. The story was implausble from the beginning as security for the Superbowl makes such taping impossible and the notion that a Patriots employee could tape the Rams walkthrough wihout being stopped by Rams team security (or NFL and stadium security) had no believability.

But it was allowed to fester and made a celebrity of Walsh, this despite his disreputable history from college through his days with the Patriots; he was a serial liar who'd falsified his resume on several occassions, harassed fellow employees, illegally taped conversations (for which he was fired after the 2002 season), and stolen vidotapes and other items from the Patriots; only after securing a wealthy indemnity deal from the NFL did he return tapes to the league, none of which differed from the tapes the Patriots had acknowledged from the beginning to have shot. He also was interrogated by NFL security and gave several stories which he repeated later to HBO with embellishment to cast himself in a more flattering and heroic light and to attack Bill Belichick; to this Belichick responded with a rare interview for CBS, conducted by their former sideline reporter Armen Keteyan.

The end result was continued smearing of the Patiots as cheaters even though there never had been cheating to begin with. Ignorance of the rule and bylaws in question continued with virtually no dissention from the now-established view damning the Patriots in general and Bill Belichick in particular. And the result remains that possibly the best team of the last 30 years is smeared as somehow illegitimate.

Except they are not ilegitimate. Videotaping is not cheating. The real issue is the one not being explored - the competence of Roger Goodell. His misstatement of the rule in his preseason memo deserves examination, for one has to question whether he is truly qualified for his job. It is impossible to think of a former Commissioner like Paul Tagliabue misstating a rule in a memo; certainly based on his handling of the Denver Broncos - fined $1 million for late-1990s cheating on the NFL's salary cap - it is impossible to think he would have done anything but issued a quiet fine and let the issue die down.

The Patriots deserve better than what they got in 2007. The team that revolutionized how football teams are constructed in the salary cap era and brought championship football to a new competitive level did so legitimately; to question their success is wrong, and Roger Goodell, by doing so, bought disrepute to himself while the Mainstream Media sank their credibility by pushing falsity to justify attacking a team that won without flamboyance.

Filming Jets coaches was the right thing to do; it's about time someone in authority in league offices come out and admit such.

Learn more about this author, Michael Daly.
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