Nathan Gregory is the managing editor at The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].Whether you’re a follower of the National Football League or not, you’ve probably heard about the New England Patriots. They’ve won three Super Bowls so far this decade and established themselves as a dynasty in doing so.
You’d really have to be out of touch with the professional sports world to be unaware of the dominance they’ve displayed since Bill Belichick took over the reins as head coach.
The legacy they built was significantly wounded, however, when league security caught and confiscated a video camera and its tape from one of the team’s video assistants in their regular season opener against the New York Jets. It was later discovered that he was taping the coaching staff’s play signals.
The Patriots were apparently playing spy games on the Jets in order to get the upper hand over second-year head coach Eric Mangini, who has previously served on Belichick’s coaching staff.
Furthermore, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell punished Belichick and his team, but it might as well have been a slap on the wrist. He ordered the coach to pony up $500,000 and issued a $250,000 fine to the organization. He also made the team relinquish their next first round draft pick if they make the playoffs this season. If they don’t advance, they have to give up their second and third round selections.
The issue has raised suspicion among other teams, who are questioning whether Belichick and his staff have been knowingly breaking this rule or simply misinterpreting it.
To top everything off, Belichick didn’t really seem to be phased when bombarded with questions regarding the decision at a press conference last Friday. He turned each inquiry away, claiming that he and the team had “moved on,” and would be offering no further explanation.
He didn’t even take the opportunity to describe how he misinterpreted the rule.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told one reporter at the conference. “We’re moving on. The decision has been made.”
This sequence of events raises several questions. For one, the Pats are the last team in the world that needs to cheat in order to win games. We’re talking about a dynasty, a team that won three world championships in four years and is still consistently solid. What are they doing stealing signals from across the sideline?
Most importantly, why did Goodell let these guys off the hook so easily? He fined Belichick half a million bucks. That seems like a lot of money, but it’s arguably pocket change for a coach raking in more than $4 million annually.
Moreover, the Patriots probably aren’t going to be devastated because they lost a draft pick. It will matter little to them because they’ll more than likely still have their anchor in quarterback Tom Brady along with a revolving-cast lineup of world-class offensive weapons.
Simply put, the league’s officials need to do a better job of realizing the severity of what Belichick has done.
Who knows how long he has allowed this kind of wrongdoing to occur under his leadership? Who can you blame for arguing that Belichick might have gotten all three of his Super Bowl rings by cheating?
Goodell did the right thing in showing the organization that he wouldn’t tolerate this above-the-law behavior, but he didn’t go far enough. Such an breach deserves suspension, and Belichick was on the sideline during Sunday’s game.
As long as Goodell treats major debacles such as this one as a minor offense, more teams will catch on and follow the trends that have surfaced in professional baseball; the attitude that coaches must do whatever they have to do in order to win.
Even if they have to cheat.