Are the New England Patriots cheaters?

No

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by Michael Daly

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The New England Patriots were not cheaters in the recent "Videogate" brouhaha that ended when the National Football League announced on September 20, 2007 that it had received, verified, and destroyed all materials related to "Videogate" activity from Bill Belichick's arrival to the Patriots in 2000. The reasons the Patriots cannot be branded as cheaters lay in understanding what the Patriots actually did and also seeing through the ulterior motives of varied critics of the organization in general and of Bill Belichick in particular.

The activity that got the Patriots branded as cheaters lay in the use of a videotape camera on the sidelines of the team's September 2007 victory over the NY Jets. The videographer recorded Jets assistant coaches signaling to players, then panned up to the scoreboard to track signals from down to down, panned down to the coaches in question upon each new down, and so forth. Much airtime was expended and ink discharged claiming that such videotaping constitutes "stealing signals," ignoring as it does that Patriot coaches in the stadium's coaching booth atop the grandstands, viewing through binoculars, were tasked with reading and decifering opponant signals. What videotaping entailed was storing visual record of opponant coaches and coordinators for future reference, as coaches and coordinators often change jobs and many become head coaches or otherwise move up in team ranks; their differing styles of coaching become a legitimate concern for a team like the Patriots to decifer and thus counter in any future contest - videotaping of Marty Schottenheimer or Tony Dungy, for instance, would allow a team in the future to read tendencies in their decision-making and thus deduce a possible countermeasure in any future game.

Such storage is a legitimate scouting activity; at no point does it interfere with an opponant's play, all it does is provide a library from which to scout opposing coaches; claim by such writers as John Clayton of ESPN that a team can break down such video during halftime of a game and make immediate use of the footage for the game's second half was pointedly shot down by Commissioner Roger Goodell in announcing the heavy fines handed down to the Patriots by the league office.

Where this activity became a controversy lay in an NFL rule ostensibly forbidding such recording from specific parts of the sidelines, with an NFL memo sent to all teams a few days before the start of the 2007 season serving as a pointed reminder of the rule. The actual rule, however, is not entirely clear about where such videotaping is banned - and one must keep in mind that rules are always interpreted differently between their authors and those who are supposed to obey them; such a clash of interpretation is a way of life in pro sports - and more importantly, despite numerous stories that the Patriots were warned by the league about such activity in 2006 victories over the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions as well as in their three 2006 meetings with the Jets, the indication is that the NFL was not enforcing this rule - in the 2007 incident that set off the firestorm, the Jets had to complain to NFL security about Patriot videography, and there was never any sign of NFL security patrolling sidelines during games to deter such filming.

The ensuing firestorm in the media tried to crucify the Patriots as cheaters but in the process disseminated information lacking any true understanding of what the Patriots did and also peddled crude and utterly implausible gossip accusing the team of multiple types of perfidy such as interfering in opponant radio communications - a claim discredited in the league's accouncement of the destruction of all "Videogate" materials - and breaking into opponant lockers to steal playbooks, claims with neither evidence nor basic believability on their side. The media firestorm also entailed cheap shots at Bill Belichick for his unenthusiastic demeanor at press briefings and for such "classless" acts as refusing to shake hands with Indianapolis Colts quarterback peyton Manning and New York Jets coach Eric Mangini.

Such criticisms were lumped into the "Videogate" stew to form an indictment of Belichick that betrayed a lack of understanding of football scouting activity - of which videotaping opposing coaches and coordinators in action represents a legitimate part - and also betrayed a sense of petty jealousy and bitterness toward the man. Just why Belichick was supposed to shake hands with people that were not worthy of respect at the time - notably Eric Mangini - was never explained by media critics of the man, and criticism of his unenthusiastic and non-informative press briefings inflated the importance of those doing the criticizing beyond all reason - why a writer less than qualified to discuss football such as Tony Massaroti or Karen Guregian (who was among the worst in peddling inaccurate gossip as quasi-fact in the "Videogate" brouhaha), or a writer with a track record of outright dishonesty about football such as Ron Borges, deserves any respect from Belichick is never explained.

Virtually nowhere in the media-created firestorm were legitimate questions asked, such as -

* If the rule banning video recording of coaches was serious or clear-cut, why was the NFL not enforcing it?

* Why is the rule in place at all? One strains to find where it serves any purpose.

* Instead of attacking Belichick's videotaping procedures, why not allow all teams to place videographers on sidelines unimpeded to record opponant coaches? There is literally nothing sinister in videotaping each other's coaching staffs in action during games.

* Were protests (official and otherwise) by other teams - Green Bay, the Jets, and Detroit - motivated by actual cheating, or petty jealousy of the Patriots? NFL analyst Vic Carucci, for one, has noted the anger toward the Patriots that exists by "have-not" teams like Green Bay, and how Roger Goodell and Patriots team owner Robert Kraft had worked together in the past, such as to negotiate the league's recent TV deal with CBS, FOX, NBC, and ESPN.

* Did Roger Goodell overreact? What was most striking about Goodell's handling of the controversy was the heavy-handedness and clumsiness involved, in contrast to the quieter handling by former commissioner Paul Tagliabue when the league discovered that the Denver Broncos had cheated on the salary cap in winning Superbowls 32 and 33 - Tagliabue fined the Broncos $1 million and forced them to forfeit at least one draft pick, then never let the issue come to the forefront again; he did it so well, in fact, that the incident has been all but forgotten. At points Goodell seemed strikingly ignorant about football - he seemed genuinely shocked that a team was actually storing video footage of opponant coaches for future reference, as though the concept was alien to football.

These are worth asking because tarring the Patriots as cheaters makes no sense when one comes to understand football and the nuances involved. If anything the Patriots should be praised for raising the scouting bar of the game, improving the sophistication of scouting to make the on-field play crisper and better directed. Football is a game where the on-field competition has gotten better as the sophistication of coaching has increased.

Videotaping is not cheating. The Patriots did nothing wrong here and deserve an apology from many corners.

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