ESPN: Deep Down the Patriots' Cheating Rabbit Hole

A shitton of an article from ESPN here. It goes into detail about how the NFL handled the initial Spygate scandal, the Patriot's other cheating methods, key individuals in the entire ordeal, the NFL's role in the subsequent cover-up and destruction of the tapes, and how NFL owners pressured Roger Goodell to go hard on Tom Brady for Deflategate as a "make-up call" for the perceived leniency on Spygate.

His bosses were furious. Roger Goodell knew it. So on April 1, 2008, the NFL commissioner convened an emergency session of the league's spring meeting at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. Attendance was limited to each team's owner and head coach. A palpable anger and frustration had rumbled inside club front offices since the opening Sunday of the 2007 season. During the first half of the New England Patriots' game against the New York Jets at Giants Stadium, a 26-year-old Patriots video assistant named Matt Estrella had been caught on the sideline, illegally videotaping Jets coaches' defensive signals, beginning the scandal known as Spygate.

Then the Patriots' coach, Bill Belichick, the cheating program's mastermind, spoke. He said he had merely misinterpreted a league rule, explaining that he thought it was legal to videotape opposing teams' signals as long as the material wasn't used in real time. Few in the room bought it. Belichick said he had made a mistake – "my mistake."

Now it was Goodell's turn. The league office lifer, then 49 years old, had been commissioner just 18 months, promoted, in part, because of Kraft's support. His audience wanted to know why he had managed his first crisis in a manner at once hasty and strangely secretive. Goodell had imposed a $500,000 fine on Belichick, a $250,000 fine on the team and the loss of a first-round draft pick just four days after league security officials had caught the Patriots and before he'd even sent a team of investigators to Foxborough, Massachusetts. Those investigators hadn't come up empty: Inside a room accessible only to Belichick and a few others, they found a library of scouting material containing videotapes of opponents' signals, with detailed notes matching signals to plays for many teams going back seven seasons. Among them were handwritten diagrams of the defensive signals of the Pittsburgh Steelers, including the notes used in the January 2002 AFC Championship Game won by the Patriots 24-17. Yet almost as quickly as the tapes and notes were found, they were destroyed, on Goodell's orders: League executives stomped the tapes into pieces and shredded the papers inside a Gillette Stadium conference room.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell appeared on ESPN's Mike & Mike show minutes after this story published. When asked about the connections made between Spygate and Deflategate, he said he had not yet had a chance to read this story but:

"I am not aware of any connection between the Spygate procedures and these procedures here. There is no connection in my mind between these two incidents."
To many owners and coaches, the expediency of the NFL's investigation – and the Patriots' and Goodell's insistence that no games were tilted by the spying – seemed dubious. It reminded them of something they had seen before from the league and Patriots: At least two teams had caught New England videotaping their coaches' signals in 2006, yet the league did nothing. Further, NFL competition committee members had, over the years, fielded numerous allegations about New England breaking an array of rules. Still nothing. Now the stakes had gotten much higher: Spygate's unanswered questions and destroyed evidence had managed to seize the attention of a hard-charging U.S. senator, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who was threatening a congressional investigation. This would put everyone – players, coaches, owners and the commissioner – under oath, a prospect that some in that room at The Breakers believed could threaten the foundation of the NFL.

Goodell tried to assuage his bosses: He ordered the destruction of the tapes and notes, he insisted, so they couldn't be exploited again. Many in the room didn't believe it. And some would conclude it was as if Goodell, Kraft and Belichick had acted like partners, complicit in trying to sweep the scandal's details under the rug while the rest of the league was left wondering how much glory the Patriots' cheating had cost their teams. "Goodell didn't want anybody to know that his gold franchise had won Super Bowls by cheating," a senior executive whose team lost to the Patriots in a Super Bowl now says. "If that gets out, that hurts your business."

Just before he finished speaking, Goodell looked his bosses in the eye and, with dead certainty, said that from then on, cheaters would be dealt with forcefully. He promised the owners that all 32 teams would be held to the same high standards expected of players. But many owners and coaches concluded he was really only sending that message to one team: the New England Patriots.

SEVEN YEARS LATER, Robert Kraft took the podium on the first day of the Patriots' 2015 training camp and, with a mix of bitterness and sadness, apologized to his team's fans. "I was wrong to put my faith in the league," he said. It was a stunning statement from the NFL owner who has been Roger Goodell's biggest booster and defender.

Goodell had just upheld the four-game suspension he had leveled in early May against quarterback Tom Brady for a new Patriots cheating scandal known as Deflategate. An NFL-commissioned investigation, led by lawyer Ted Wells, after four months had concluded it "was more probable than not" that Brady had been "at least generally aware" that the Patriots' footballs used in the AFC Championship Game held this year had been deflated to air pressure levels below what the league allowed. Goodell deemed the Patriots and Brady "guilty of conduct detrimental to the integrity of, and public confidence in, the game of football," the league's highest crime, and punished the franchise and its marquee player.

Kraft was convinced Brady was innocent, but he "reluctantly" accepted the punishment, in large part because he was certain Goodell would reduce, or eliminate, his quarterback's four-game suspension, the way business is often done in the NFL. Kraft had good reason to believe Goodell might honor a quid pro quo: Throughout Goodell's nightmare 2014 season of overturned player discipline penalties, bumbling news conferences and a lack of candor, Kraft had publicly stood by the commissioner – even as he privately signaled deep disappointment in Goodell's performance and fury at the judgment of his top lieutenants, according to sources. After Goodell had upheld Brady's punishment, on the basis mainly of his failure to cooperate by destroying his cellphone, Kraft felt burned and betrayed.

Now, the owner of the defending Super Bowl champions was publicly ripping the league. To anyone casually watching Deflategate, the civil war pitting Goodell against the Patriots and their star quarterback made no sense. Why were the league's premier franchise, led by a cherished team owner, and Brady, one of the NFL's greatest ambassadors, being smeared because a little air might have been let out of some footballs?

But league insiders knew that Deflategate didn't begin on the eve of the AFC Championship Game.

It began in 2007, with Spygate.

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/13533995/split-nfl-new-england-patriots-apart

Rare investigative journalism from ESPN. Cherish it.

(Read the whole article. It's good.)