The Untold Story Of Spygate

[JayCee]

Actually the Patriots were fined and were stripped of a draft pick. Belichick was personally fined $500,000 and the organization $250,000. They lost a 1st round pick, but get this, if they missed the playoffs they would only lose their 2nd and 3rd. Sort of like the draft were poor performance garners a higher pick, only in this case they keep the higher pick. Which is odd in itself.

Can't argue with what bigv says. The Saints lied and continued the practice of rewarding players for everything from knock downs to cart offs. Williams promoted a hyper aggressive, punishing style of play that paid out for harm done. I haven't heard much evidence of illegal hits that drew flags or penalties durring the games. I'm sure they've reviewed tape till their eyes ache looking for that months after the fact, but to be fair, they'd have to go that route with every player that laid someone out and didn't draw a flag. Which they do with corrosponding fines, etc now, but usually within days. Nothing was said against the vast majority of these plays at the time.

Plus these type of pools and kitties have been in existance for decades and have been part of the culture of the league through the generations. A week before all this came down, two Giant defenders were openly chatting about taking out some rival. (no, I'm not going to find a link, it was headline news at a couple of sites though).

The bottom line is spygate is the only yardstick to measure a team/coach instigated violation of similiar proportions. The punishments to individuals went beyond what was resonable.

Again the evidence against individual players is supect and speculative and even if it were iron clad, nothing so far has been brought to light that any of these players injured anyone through cheating or breaking the rules on the field. There were no options like NE got for a lesser punishment based on future performance. In fact, if the truth came out, I'm pretty sure that the tapes would prove that there would be enough on them that teams that lost championships to NE would be declaring themselves the legitimate winners.

The Patriots didn't get a warning and opportunity to deny or admit they had been taping previous, or a chance to continue if they did. They were ratted out and caught red handed, continuing an illegal practice they must have employed to some degree against every team they faced. So there is no comparing goody two shoes New England for coming clean while New Orleons continued their violations. That basically shoots that down.

If Goodall wanted to set an example, he didn't have to be so severe this time around. Sure they deserved suspensions, fines and loss of picks, but he went to far based on what he's shown so far. He would have been better off to hold up some and promise to lower the boom big time on any future offenders.

That's why I stated in my post "minimal monetary punishment." You fine a man $500,000 a year, which is ALOT of money for me; but Belichick is the highest paid coach in all of the NFL making 7.5 million a year. He is also the second highest paid coach in ALL of sports! Then we have Bob Kraft who is worth an estimated $1.7 Billion dollars (I would say $250,000 is not much of a dent in his pocket).

Now to the first round draft pick - yes that is significant. But if I recall - they had the 10th pick that year from the Saints besides their own pick in the first round. I think a more fair punishment (even though I understand it's not logical), would have been to take away their 10th pick and maybe let them keep their 31st pick. I think they picked Jarod Mayo with that pick (not sure). I actually would've taken away both first rounders all together.


The Saints lost their 2 2nd round picks in 2012 and 2013 respectively, and they probably would've lost their first round pick in 2012 had it not belonged to the Patriots this year (irony). Like I said, I completely agree that the Saints should have harsher punishment than the Patriots. To me though, the way the tapes were burned, and the way everything went down, the punishment did not even come close to where one would think cheating is involved. Why didn't they suspend BB for ANY games?? I do think that people that say that their titles should have been stripped are ridiculous though.

All in all, I will say this: I'm a Dolphins fan, and that could very well cloud my view of what's fair or not because I don't like the Patriots (jealousy I suppose LOL), but unfortunately my mind will not change on this.

[MAYHEM]

The Saints were punished fairly. The Patriots were let off to easy.

[MR NFLFAN]

The writer should think about a retitle of his book...how about my "The untold spygate conspiracy theory".