2015 NFL thread

[SteelCurtain]

Videotaping opposing coaches is not illegal in the NFL per se, but there are designated areas allowed by the league to do such taping.

This means that there are places in the skyboxes by which a team can get their game film. They can utilize those cameras any way they wish. If they are choosing to devote some of those cameras to recording coaching signals, they can---but it will come at the cost of certain vantage points for game film and real time film study. (In 2007 it was the B&W printouts that units would study in between drives, now it's the baby blue MS Surface tablets)

What the Patriots did was have people on the sidelines in NFL tracksuits (with the red "X" on it marking them as NFL crew) covering up their mandated Patriots gear. They were told to tell people, if asked, that they were with NFL Films, or if pressed, "Kraft Productions."

The allegations against the Patriots prompted NFL executive vice president of football operations Ray Anderson to send a letter to all 32 team owners, general managers and head coaches on Sept. 6, 2006, reminding them that "videotaping of any type, including but not limited to taping of an opponent's offensive or defensive signals, is prohibited from the sidelines."

But the Patriots kept doing it. In November 2006, Green Bay Packers security officials caught Matt Estrella shooting unauthorized footage at Lambeau Field. When asked what he was doing, according to notes from the Senate investigation of Spygate that had not previously been disclosed, Estrella said he was with Kraft Productions and was taping panoramic shots of the stadium. He was removed by Packers security. That same year, according to former Colts GM Bill Polian, who served for years on the competition committee and is now an analyst for ESPN, several teams complained that the Patriots had videotaped signals of their coaches. And so the Patriots -- and the rest of the NFL -- were warned again, in writing, before the 2007 season, sources say.

But they kept on doing it anyways.

ON SEPT. 9, 2007, in the first game of the season, Estrella aimed a video camera at the New York Jets' sideline, unaware he was the target of a sting operation. [...] 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." They took him into a small room off the stadium's tunnel, confiscated his camera and tape, and made him wait. He was sweating. Someone gave Estrella water, and he was shaking so severely that he spilled it. "He was s---ting a brick," a source says.

Then Goodell and Kraft meet in Foxboro. Belichick says he misinterpreted the rule (after being sent no less than 2 notices that taping from the sidelines was against the rule.) Goodell looks at all the tapes, from as early as 2000. He decides that the appropriate thing to do is to destroy all the tapes immediately. The decision and fines came out two days later, and the Patriots said nothing in protest.

The fact is, they were notorious for cheating in other, more effective ways.

In fact, many former New England coaches and employees insist that the taping of signals wasn't even the most effective cheating method the Patriots deployed in that era. 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.

Don van Natter Report

They knew what they were doing. They knew it was against the rules. They did it for years, and when they got caught, they called it a "smear job" and all the loyal New England fans went right along with it. Deflategate was not ever about the balls. It was about Goodell fulfilling a promise that if Belichick got caught again the punishment would be much more severe. It probably didn't affect many games. There were some that stood out to Ernie Adams, and some of those games were big ones. The 2002 AFC Championship being one of them.