Greatest #12?

I credit Belichick with the success.

I don't know if I would go so far as labeling him a cheater. All teams try to gain competitive advantages; the problem with Belichick is that he's turned that into a science. He is willing to do anything to gain an advantage, even if/when he doesn't need it. He's obsessed with not just winning, but humiliating his opponent. Football is war to him, which is why Ernie Adams is on the staff.

Brady is a great QB and a perfect complement to Belichick. But Belichick can win with anyone--even took a kid who hadn't played in college and won 11 games. I don't think Brady wins much without Belichick.

 

I think you give Belichick way too much credit if you can't label him as a cheater. You just don't go out there and tape other teams practices and call signals with the intention of using them against their opponent and then give credit to their own success. It can't be both ways. If he is so great, then he would beat opponents fair and square. Instead he used those tactics in order to gain an advantage to win at any and all costs. I will always label him as a cheater.

If a bank robber is given keys and the ability to shut off the security system for an evening in order to take all the loot, is he still a thief or is he just getting a "competitive advantage" against the normal crook?

To me, Belichick is a habitual deceptive liar.

 

Wait, how is he not a cheater? No one here is against gaining advantages in unconventional ways. He did it in ways that are against the rules. On purpose. That's cheating.

He's not the first guy to think of playing with a different inflation level... that's why the rule was already in place. He's just good at going years without getting caught, and then getting a punishment light enough to warrant more cheating.

Why didn't Belichick succeed in Cleveland? He had a good QB there, and he managed to go 36-44 in 5 seasons, finishing 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 2nd, and 4th (in a 4 team division). Hmm, the only era of his career that hasn't been marred by cheating was a failure. That's funny. Oh well. Probably doesn't mean a thing.

 

I just think "cheater" is a strong and loaded word. If we want to gwt technical, then, a lot of teams and coaches cheated. Don't get me wrong: I think BB is a bit of a scumbag, but the reasons are maybe more complicated than him being simply a cheater. As I said, he takes competitive advantage to a whole new level. He is a football genius; but I also thonk he's a little insane.

 

I sort of get your point. Someone could cheat at one small thing one time without "Cheater" being their identity. Like, I peeked at my dad's Go Fish cards when I was 4. That doesn't necessarily make me a cheater today.

But I don't buy for a second that Belichick got caught up in the confusing rules and accidentally cheated in two different ways over the course of - what, 15 years? ...I was ready to call him a cheater after the first time he was caught cheating for many years. He continued cheating after that, so I'm more than ready to call him a cheater. If, 5 years from now, it turns out he cheated in some third way for years 2015-2020, will you consider him a cheater then? What does it take? Who is a cheater if not him?

 

Don't people cheat every game and that's why there's such a thing as flags? LOL. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there still aren't a certain sect of Seattle fans that consider us cheaters for all the holding and PI they swear we supposedly engaged in that cost them the game. Cheating really does have a broad definition. Bill apparently doesn't care to push it to the absolute limit though. But does everyone generally consider him innocent in this case? I mean do you consider this ALL Tom? I personally think Bill probably knew about it since when it originally broke he said something like "ask Tom". He didn't flat out deny it ya know?

 

I gueess I'm just being cyniucal. LOL.

Cheat on a test at Harvard, you can be kicked out school. Cheat on your taxes, you can face heavy fines. Cheat in terms of videotaping opponents? Nothing. Belichick has never been suspended or fined (personally) for any of his offenses. So, in his mind, it can't be cheating if he gets away with it. And the NFL has mostly turned a blind eye to it, too. It's "ho hum."

 

Well I was just talking more about guys holding and PI and things like that. Seems like I read once that Jerry Rice would go to ref school so he could get juuuuuust close enough to breaking the rules without actually doing it. Teddy Bruschi would do the same and we know who he played for. As for the center, it's just mostly all he can do to stand still and not stumble over all that man beef he's carrying around. LOL.

 

What's next, Brady gets an intentional grounding penalty and takes it to court?

 

If there's a competitive advantage to be gained from it I wouldn't put it past them. LOL. Although really that would be more of an Al Davis-y thing to do.

 

I'm not saying it was. I was just saying that players like to try and push it to the absolute limit to get as close to a competitive advantage as possible. They are walking the line as finely as possible. My buddy told me once that Jerry Rice said that the best thing about going to those ref schools was that you could find out what they COULD call but probably WOULDN'T call and then try and do it. I seen Teddy Bruschi once saying he encouraged a lot of young guys to go so they could see what they could get away with too. Their motives for going there are at least dubious.

 

I want to get this out somewhere in the discussion. I have siad in other threads for some time that I believe that the failure in Cleveland has forced Belichick to want to never have that experience again. It is the driving factor behind his obsessive planning. Something that gets lost in the spygate discussion is that it wasn't "just" the attempted/successful stealing of defensive hand signals. I know Coach Cowher and every other HC turned commentator, player and what not has copped to doing the same thing. The cheating comes when they were illegally taping walk-throughs, practices and anything else they could get tape on that they weren't suppose to have. It was the attempt to gain a tactical advantage by having information they should not have had, that they gained in an illegal manner, were reluctant to provide when caught and unapologetic for trying to circumvent the rules that apply to all teams.

Now as far as Tom Brady goes and whether he is a cheater or not. He was one of the driving forces behind teams preparing their own footballs, at any time did he push for regulations that were favorable to him? Did he make his preference known? After the rule took affect did he go to his players union rep or the league rep and request a change? At any time did he work through proper channels to try and change the rule? If the answer to any of those is NO and yet he asked these two guys to deflate balls for him because they made it easier for him to grip then his is guilty of trying to gain an advantage on the field that other QB's did not have or were not given. In doing so without talking to the league or team officials aka Kraft or Belichick he was then keeping it from them and breaking a rule. The length of time he had been doing this and the number of games it affected should warrant stiff penalties because he challenged the integrity of the game.

 

I hear you. But in-game stuff like regular penalties have penalties. You hold a guy, the other team gets a first down and some yards. Instant way of setting it right. It's a deal everyone has agreed to. Sometimes a team can manipulate those penalties to benefit themselves (like holding a receiver that burned you, so you only get a PI call instead of a TD allowed), but that's all part of the game. That's all in the rules. You are allowed to hold and PI - you just have to accept the yellow flag that comes with it.

Illegally videotaping opponents, illegally deflating balls, illegally injecting yourself with steroids... that's a different kind of cheating. There's no way to quantify the effect, like there is when an OT holds a DE. How do you penalize that stuff? Should the Pats have started off the Super Bowl with a 15 yard penalty? For all we know their cheating could have been what got them into the playoffs, so that would be nothing at all!

How many home runs did Barry Bonds really hit? How many were him, and how many were steroids? Which do you take away? These questions are why the answer is, "Doesn't matter. Erase them all." Take him out of the record books, or add that deathly asterisk. It's the only way. If you don't, you are validating his BS record he got by cheating, you are pissing on those that did it right like Hank Aaron, and you are encouraging future cheating.

Maybe the Pats' cheating led to multiple wins. Keep in mind, it wasn't just those Super Bowls - they cheated in the seasons leading up to them. Maybe without cheating they'd have won none of those 4 Super Bowls. Maybe they'd have won all 4 of them. Maybe 1, 2, or 3. We have no idea. No one does. That's the problem. That's why the only answer is to erase those wins, or give them an asterisk. Don't validate the cheating, don't piss on those that play by the rules, and for the love of god please stop encouraging it.

 

Great post!

 

Perhaps the fact that the Pats and Brady didn't win every superbowl despite cheating should be what they are most remembered for.

 

What's funny is a lot of the stuff that happens in game we sometimes sorta boil down to "gamesmanship" UNLESS it's happening to us THEN we might call it cheating. It's like it has to do with perspective or something. Like when a guy sorta feigns injury to save a timeout or something like that. Or when guys take longer to unpile on 2min drives. Or when Cody Wallace.... well... you know... LOL. As far as the performance enhancers go I'd say they definitely constitute cheating and I would point to Lance Armstrong to justify that statement. Even more than Bonds or McGwire or Sosa(who I absolutely adored as a Cubs fan btw). I suppose if you want to yank those guys homers what you should do is just go back to when their heads didn't look like watermelons and their necks didn't look like greek columns and let them keep those but once they swelled beyond human reason it was obvious what they were doing. Ironically though that was when baseball was at the best it has probably been in my lifetime. I think that's why the league turns a blind eye to stuff like that for as long as they can. I totally agree that cheating should be stopped in all sports but I'd say that's never gonna happen. People will always find a way to skirt the rules. It's like when Gary Shandling talked about building a fence on the mexican border and said "If I were an illegal alien the only thing I would have against that fence is a ladder". LOL.

 

there is nothing wrong with Dr. Wallace doing some free prostrate exams for his fellow players.

 

You're not giving me enough credit. I don't like having dirty or cheating players on my own team, either. It's not perspective. It's cheating. There are plenty of Steelers fans that are just as rotten as Pats fans. Ones that would come up with some other word for it when they're the ones benefiting. But those people are rotten, just like the Pats fans that have the balls to defend their team.

I don't defend Ben's off-field problems, I don't defend Cody Wallace's on-field problems. If they want to throw that guy out, I say go for it. I defend James Harrison's and Ryan Clark's on-field problems, because they were getting punished for playing by the rules, but too hard. A lot of people are capable of putting fairness ahead of loyalty. As they should be. Why would you want to be loyal to a cheating team?

 

I agree about Clark and Harrison. I think there's such a thing as being "dirty" but there is also such a thing as being "nasty" and I put those 2 in the "nasty" camp. Hines was in it too. I think they played totally within the rules and didn't hit people out of bounds and things like that. What they did was between the whistles and they just leveled people. I know some people called Hines "dirty" for blindsiding people but I don't think there's a rule that says you have to say "HEY! TURN AROUND! I'M ABOUT TO LEVEL YOU!" I just consider it old school nasty football to drill anything that moves. I consider what Suh does to be absolutely cheating. Kicking a dude in the groin and standing on an injured leg is completely bush league.

 

Give me our #12 over any #12 or any other QB in the Super Bowl. What Bradshaw did in Super Bowls is pretty simple. He came up big in big moments. Every. Single. Time!!!

 

"It makes you wonder what else they've been doing that they haven't been caught doing yet." - Brian Dawkins, after Deflategate broke.

Indeed.

Back when Spygate hit, SI's Paul Zimmerman (probably the greatest pro football writer of all time) wrote that another issue that GMs, coaches, and players complained about (but was rarely reported) was the headsets at Gillette. According to Zimmerman's report, visitors' headsets always seemed to go out at inopportune times, start fading in and out, etc. There was some suspicion that the Pats eavesdropped on those telecommunications. Peter King later blogged that the headsets were encrypted so poorly that anyone with any training could break into those communications.

The home team is responsible for all communications set-ups. This was true in the playoffs, too...until the 2007 AFCCG. The NFL, responding to to some concerns, decided to do the set-ups and monitored those setups all game long. This seemed like an enormous "Gotcha." Suddenly, the unbeaten Pats struggled mightily against a Chargers team without Tomlinson and with Rivers playing on a torn knee ligament. And we all know how that Super Bowl went, too. It makes you wonder how much the headsets played a role in the Pats' demolition of opponents on the road to the undefeated regular season.