How much has paranoia cost Patriots’ opponents through the years?
Before the biggest game of the NFL season, the Seattle Seahawks spent a lot of time and effort chasing a ghost.
SI.com led off an interesting story about the New England Patriots’ mysterious ways with a tale about Seattle’s Super Bowl prep this past January. The story talked about all the precautions Seattle took after multiple teams, unsolicited, told the Seahawks to secure their practices because they were facing the Patriots (cue the drama button). Security guards were brought in to keep an eye on the perimeter, parking garages in the area were swept, the mountain near the practice facility was monitored.
And almost as an afterthought, the story revealed that nothing was ever found. No spy cameras. No moles. All that time and effort before the Super Bowl spent on nothing. The Seahawks lost on their last offensive play, coming up 1 yard short in one of the closest Super Bowls ever. Is there a cause and effect between all the energy spent on the unfounded fear of the Patriots spying, and the Seahawks losing by a razor-thin margin? Maybe not. But it couldn’t have helped.
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Right or wrong, NFL teams obviously believe the Patriots are spying on everything. Tony Dungy said earlier this year that Peyton Manning thought the visiting locker room at Gillette Stadium was bugged and would act accordingly. There has been no evidence of bugged locker rooms, of course. The SI story and an ESPN.com story from Wednesday that detailed the Patriots’ spygate controversy had numerous stories of opponents’ paranoia. There are stories of opposing teams being suspicious of random folks on the sidelines carrying iPhones, and emptying out garbage cans at team hotels because they’re worried about the Patriots’ snooping. The SI.com story cites a longtime head coach who said he “ran fake plays in his Saturday walkthroughs at Gillette Stadium because he thought the Patriots might be spying on his team.” (Ummmmm … WHAT???)
The Patriots seem to have beaten many opponents before they ever step on the field, and it’s not because they know all the plays that are coming.
Is there some legitimate reason for worry? Probably. ESPN.com said there were 40 games in which the Patriots taped signals from 2000-07, and even if you don’t believe that specific number, it’s hard to deny that Patriots coach Bill Belichick will often push the envelope. Whether you believe all’s fair within the letter of the rules or outside the scope of fair play is up to you. But there’s zero debate that the Patriots have other teams spooked, and they spend a lot of time and energy worried about what the Patriots might be doing.
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Even stealing signals, which got a renewed focus on Wednesay through ESPN’s long story on the Patriots, is nothing new. Herman Edwards said on ESPN that pro scouts are dispatched to press boxes and one of their jobs is to watch coaches and try to figure out signals (“It happens every Sunday,” Edwards said). Bill Polian came on right after Edwards and said as a pro scout, that was one of his jobs, to decipher signals from future opponents. But trying to do the same thing every other team does, but doing it by videotaping, is ruining the integrity of the league? That’s dubious, at best. How can someone be that pious about how signals are stolen? It’s OK if teams steal signals in a more inefficient way? That makes no logical sense. There’s some argument of when videotaping from the sideline became illegal; ESPN cited a memo sent out by the NFL in September of 2006 reminding teams that videotaping from the sideline was illegal. Also, it was only specifically banned from the sidelines, not from anywhere else in the stadium. The Patriots were just dumb to get caught on the sideline. Patriots coach Bill Belichick argued back then he misinterpreted the rule.
A lot of this is just the myth of Belichick’s Patriots. People from teams that lost the first three Super Bowls to the Patriots — the Rams, Panthers and Eagles — complained in one or both stories published Wednesday that they felt cheated. There’s no evidence any of them were. It’s just unfounded gripes that maybe playbooks were stolen or practices watched. It’s an easy built-in excuse.
It doesn’t matter anymore if the Patriots are spying or not. They don’t need to because everyone seems to be psyched out. Since the 2007 season opener, when the Jets and the NFL ran a sting operation on a Pats employee videotaping on the sidelines, New England is 99-28 in the regular season. The whole spygate thing happened eight years ago and the Patriots have still won at an incredible rate. Still teams wonder about spying, or stolen playbooks, or bugged locker rooms, or Patriots’ employees digging through garbage cans for info. At least one coach ran fake plays during his practice just in case. Think about that.
Even if the Patriots aren’t doing the slightest thing to cheat, the NFL perception is they do. The reaction to that perception, and all the energy spent fighting it, might be a bigger edge than any cheating itself could create.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
