Senator Arlen Specter investigating the Patriots

Great point I would think that these things are obvious but some people just don't think deeply enough to see that.

I really care about cheating in football because I like football. If someone can know the defenses before the play or know the scripted plays I think that would be a huge advantage. Why not spend a few weeks seeing if the NFL is breaking the law.

I feel that destroying tapes for no good reason is a warning sign for something bigger than reported.

What does 1 senator do anyway? He votes on bills and works on commitees. So what if he wants to make sure a huge business like the NFL is flying straight.

Wouldn't be a huge blackeye for the NFL if it was proven that the Pats were huge cheaters? And didn't deserve their dynasty status. I think so. I also think that they(NFL execs and owners) might have thought about the total consequences and decided to destroy the tapes to hinder the "spygate" questions any futher.

Good for Sen. Spector. He sees bullshit and he has the balls enough to see that the NFL might be consealing something to benifit them selves. Some "yes" men just don't have the heart to go agaist the grain. He does.  

If it were anyone but Specter, I'd have a better feeling about putting the big, bad NFL in it's place, but Arlen just comes off as the pissed off Eagles fan who authored the single-bullet theory.  It's cringe worthy that he's involved.  

If anything does come of this, it'll be additional paranoia from NFL coaches about closing practice sessions and walk-throughs.  

why would the commish of the NFL want to expose a larger instance of cheating (if there was one)? wouldn't it make his league, the NFL, look worse? wouldn't he catch a lot of sh!t for that?

while i do see some personal interests for spector here, i also think it's a good idea. look what bud selig is dealing with in the baseball world. the commish is responsible for the leauge, so what motivation does he have to expose scandels?

that's why we need independent third party investigators looking over some of these things.

http://poorsportsblog.blogspot.com  

If you remember back to Super Bowl 36, you might remember comments from Willie McGinnest to the effect that the coaches instructed the players to purposefully cheat on the field by holding and using unnecessary roughness to slow down the Rams offense.  It was pretty blatant to.  "Coach told us to hold" type of thing, not "Coach told us to make sure he doesn't get off the line cleanly."  Clearly, the Belicheat coaching staff does not believe the rules of the game actually apply to them until they are caught.

Slowly its coming to light about players Belicheat has signed using illicit subtances, like Roidney Harrison's HGH use and Todd Sauerbrun's use of steroids.  Certainly there are more.

Now as time goes by, we have allegations of the Patriots taping the Rams walk-through in Super Bowl 36.  Undoubtedly there is much more than even this - just use your imagination and think about what Ernie Adams and Co. might have been doing for Belicheat.  There are, for example, the allegations of players wearing wires to tape opponents offensive line calls.

For example, it makes no sense at all for New England to have been stealing Green Bay's signals in 2006, because New England rarely plays Green Bay.  What do they gain by gathering such information?  It does make sense if they were involved in a consortium with an NFC team or teams that were trading illicit information back and forth.  For example, the Cowboys, with Belicheat's friend Bill Parcells, who openly admitted he talked with Belicheat very frequently last year about football topics, personnel, game planning, etc.  I'm not saying that happened, but if one puts together the pieces of the puzzle in front of oneself, one begins to draw such inferences and suspicions.

Look at Belicheat's personnel life too.  What a man does in private, he will also do in public if he thinks he can get away with it.  Belicheat, who was married, in private is mixed up in an affair with a married woman working for the Giants involving payoffs of money and the like to her.  Are those the actions of a man of integrity?  If Belicheat in private is willing to pay money to people to gain perceived advantages in his personnel life, what is to say he would not do it at work?  Is it unthinkable that he paid off employees of other teams to steal information, or planted moles on their staffs?  What about paying off referees to shade calls to his team?  Isn't it amazing how few times the Patriots have been called for offensive holding or offensive pass interference since 2004, when their play was part of the driving force for a rule remphasis?  Look it up.

The dismissive attitudes some have taken make no sense either, i.e. the "you can't get much from taping these signals".  If so, if it was really just a waste of time, then the Patriots would not have been engaged in a longstanding attempt to comprimise the integrity of the game as Goodell put it.  Rather, it seems likely these videos were very useful and were uploaded into the Patriots computers and tagged and sorted so that Belicheat and Co. could call them up by factors like score and down and distance and gain a bigger picture of what his opponents were doing like is done with coaches tapes so as to give an extra edge in game planning.  If so, its extremely difficult to believe these tapes do not still exist in Foxboro on a computer somewhere, with Belicheat relying on the Jesuitical understanding that he handed over "all the tapes and notes" as requested, but not all the computer files.

As to why congress might be involved in this, you have a multi-billion dollar industry spread over the whole country with tens of millions of followers who spend huge amounts of money every year.  You have legalized gambling on this industry permitted by congress based on the assumption of fair play among teams and appropriate punishments for rule-breaking.  Haven't you ever heard of the concept of business fraud?  If the NFL were not to act upon these allegations, investigate, and impose sanctions they would be liable for fraud lawsuits and criminal sanctions just like happened to Enron, Worldcom, etc.

The Black Sox scandal involved gambling and payoffs.  This doesn't ... yet.  But lets just wait and see what unfolds.  What is very clear at this point is that Belicheat is an egomaniac who thinks the rules do not apply to him in any sphere of his life, and that morality is what he is able to get away with.  When dealing with a person like that, exposure of one tiny rule violation is usually the start of something much bigger.  We just have to wait and see who will talk.

You are totally right on point. Did you hear what all the people were saying. "You wouldn't get that much of an advantage" or "it's not as big as people are making it to be". These people are stupid to think that knowing what Defense is going to doesn't help. Sure it does. Billacheat wouldn't have done this if it didn't help.

When you bring up Parcells you make a great point. Why wouldn't he help out his friends? He would. This guy doesn't even have enough honor to the game to shake hands with the other coachs more than 1 sec. That's disrepectful. He's a joke. And anyone who is made that the government is looking closer is a stupid in my opinion. WHy would it be ok for the PATS to cheat? They are making Billions of Dollars ya know. Andrew makes a great point but I would like to add that not all government is a bad and immoral.

They should talk to this former tape guy and all the former Pats players and if they find out anything fishy they should suspend the Pats whole staff and have other coachs and insiders help the investigation. This is fair.

This is really interesting.

At the news conference, Goodell disclosed several things the NFL previously had refused to discuss. He said that only six tapes and some notes had been turned over to the league by the Patriots, not voluminous materials, as had been assumed; that the tapes all contained only in-game film of opponents' sidelines; and that the oldest tape was from the 2006 regular season, with nothing before that year. ....

Goodell's remarks were puzzling in several respects. First, if the Patriots were guilty only of occasional sideline taping, this would seem to merit a letter of reprimand. So why were the Patriots hit with the harshest fine in NFL history? When the scandal first broke, Goodell used extremely strong language about New England's sins. Now, he was implying the whole thing was no big deal. ....

Finally, Goodell declared that the materials the league destroyed contained no evidence of Super Bowl cheating. But the material went back only to 2006. The Patriots' Super Bowl wins came in 2002, 2004 and 2005. Of course the material contained no evidence of Super Bowl cheating! Did the league ask just for materials dating to 2006, or was that all the Patriots volunteered?

How would Mangini have known to look for this if it started in 2006, when he left the Patriots before that?  Clearly the Patriots did not turn everything over if it only goes back to 2006.  Its also highly doubtful that 6 tapes and some notes were not put into a digitial form in this digital age.

Furthermore, Ernie Adams, "Director of Football Research" has been working for Head Coach Belicheat since his days at the Browns in the early 1990's.  While at the Browns, his purpose on the payroll was hidden even from the owner, Art Modell, who offered money to anyone who could tell him what Adams was doing with the team.  This fits the pattern of Robert Kraft being blindsided by the scandal, and also allows the organization plausible deniability when these issues are raised, because the organization does not know what Belicheat's black-ops department is up to.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=adams

Who, exactly, is Ernie Adams?

"I don't know what his job title is," linebacker Adalius Thomas says. "I didn't even know his last name was Adams."

"Ernie is a bit of a mystery to all of us," offensive tackle Matt Light says. "I'm not sure what Ernie does, but I'm sure whatever it is, he's good at it." ...

This brings us to the million-dollar question: Behind the quirks and the strange attire and the random attacks of sleep, what is it that Ernie Adams, you know, does? Years ago, Modell offered $10,000 to anyone who could tell him. No one could. A few years back, during a team film session, the Patriots players put up a slide of Adams. The caption read: "What does this man do?" Everyone cracked up. But no one knew. ...

Adams' reach doesn't stop there. The Patriots are famous for compartmentalizing: The scouts can't watch practice, the game planners don't know who they are going to draft, and so on. But Adams is into everything. ...

On game day, Adams wears a headset in the press box, a direct line to Belichick. Adams advises Belichick on which plays to challenge, and charts trends. "The one thing the Patriots do better than anyone else is they adjust and make halftime adjustments," Sturges says. "Ernie Adams is the guy who does that."

Are there other game-day duties? While it is commonly accepted that most teams try to steal signals, and New England was actually caught in the well-publicized Spygate incident, one former Patriots insider said a videotape of signals wouldn't help the other 31 teams nearly as much because they wouldn't have Ernie Adams there to quickly analyze and process the information.

So yeah, that spying information is useless to the talkinghead dipawds on ESPN, who are obviously so "good" at coaching that they are no longer doing it, but it would clearly be useful to someone like Adams and would clearly be used by an amoral fraud like Belicheat.

You said it better than me.

I don't usally agree with you but your genious leaves me no choice on this topic.

Billacheat is a smart guy. He is a master problem solver and he can use people effectivly. I like that. I really like that maybe he might get caught doing all this stuff.

I might even like Reid more because he doesn't do all of this crap and still is porductive. I have to say that I will rethink my last 3 months of crap if Billicheat is caught. I like winning and smarts but a game is a game. And if he cheated he should be banned from the NFL for life. Plan and simple. Lets all thank Eric Mangini he opened the can of worms and maybe Sen. Spector can catch Goodell coving up all this crap.

I can't wait to see what happens. But we still need playmakers and have the coach chill with his stubborness. LOL