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Patriots being investigated after Colts game (2 Viewers)

Percent of NFL teams actively trying to steal play sheets?

  • 0%

    Votes: 90 33.0%
  • 25%

    Votes: 91 33.3%
  • 50%

    Votes: 19 7.0%
  • 75%

    Votes: 16 5.9%
  • 100%

    Votes: 57 20.9%

  • Total voters
    273
The court case was specifically a trial about guilt or innocence and the verdict was total exoneration of tom brady, the patriots, everything. If you didnt know that then I don't know what you've been watching the last seven months.
O.J. Simpson was not-guilty.

 
I've heard Bob Kraft sends tainted ketchup and other condiments to the opposing teams the weeks they play them, to induce food-sickness!

:shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

 
The Patriots don't do anything wrong.

Its all just hate, jealousy, and the master plan of the NFL to bring them and Brady down.

 
The court case was specifically a trial about guilt or innocence and the verdict was total exoneration of tom brady, the patriots, everything. If you didnt know that then I don't know what you've been watching the last seven months.
Have you ever worked as an information minister in Iraq?

 
Cheating is cheating. Whether it's taking performance enhancing drugs or having your team camera guys dress like their from NFL Films so the other teams don't know your filming their practices or instructing your ball boys to let air out the game balls after the referees inspect them. It doesn't matter how you cheat. People hate cheaters. I'm just trying to explain to you why so many people hate your team. Because you seem confused into thinking it's because they've been successful. People didn't hate the 49ers in the 80's. Or the Jordan Bulls. Or Tiger Woods (pre womanizing scandal). Winning doesn't make you hated. Cheating constantly, and having a smug attitude about it, is why your team is hated by the other teams and their fans.
The 49ers in the '80s cheated, too, though.

If cheating is cheating, then there are a lot of teams in many leagues and many sports that have cheated. If all 32 NFL teams were have found to have done something against the rules, then what? Would people label all 32 teams as cheaters? Or at that point would there be different gradations of cheating? Or would certain things be overlooked for some teams but not for others?
Someone should put together a web site with a list of all the teams and the times they've been caught cheating
That would be considered propaganda and severely one-sided to deflect attention away from the biggest cheating team in sports history.
In fairness, the website in question positively reeks of yellow journalism. I'm firmly on board the "everyone cheats" bandwagon, and I love taking a look back at stuff like this through history. But pretending that the Broncos version of Spygate, (which as far as we know lasted one game, wasn't used, and for which every participant was fired as soon as the owner learned) was somehow worse than the Patriots version is absurd. That's taking a good idea in theory and ruining it in practice.

I'd love to read a really good, objective book on cheating in football through history. Some of the stories I've seen are amazing. Like Pop Warner having pouches sewn on the back of his jerseys and telling his players to tuck the football into them so the other team couldn't tell who had it.

 
anyone that won a fantasy football championship with any patriots player in their starting lineup at any point during the season should have to vacate their title

 
Green and Gold said:
What amazes me about the NFL's handling of this is that if they had limited it to organizational penalties (fines, draft picks) and only fined Brady instead of suspended him, everyone would still consider Brady to be guilty and his 'legacy' would be tarnished, and the Patriots would be again labeled cheaters with only homers doubting it. By suspending him and then upholding the suspensions, enough NFL lying is leaked from the court proceedings that (according to Peter King) there is a sense that even some hard-line Patriot haters in the league are not convinced Brady actually did anything.

How do you go from a slam-dunk media and league win to that?
Because of karma. If you set out to "pay back" the patriots because you feel they got off lightly for spygate, everything you do from that point forward is contaminated by the seed of bad intent.

What fascinates me about the new espn/si stories is the open-faced admission that deflategate was effectively made up to punish entities for past action.

This is the kind of stuff that goes on in smoke-filled backrooms, and it makes me giggle that we have come full circle to where there in an implicit admission that deflategate was a tempest in a teapot, manufactured by certain owners with an axe to grind.

#JayFeeley

 
I've heard NFL players, former and current all day today on radio saying that it is literally impossible to sneak into their locker room and steal play sheets whether the team was on the field or not.

Do these nebulous sources have names yet?

 
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Imagine a league where, if I'm to believe the quotes of Steve Maruicci, Bill Parcells, and others, where attempts to steal signals were commonplace, and the rules were vague.

So a new commissioner comes in and issues a memorandum of clarification, and one team assumes it's same old, same old, and basically ignores the memo.

This is why the league hammered Belichick for spygate. He gave Roger the finger, and paid the price for it.

Historical revisionists will try to tell you that what NE staff did was singular. That is not not accurate. There is ample evidence that trying to figure out the other teams signals was commonplace, as it is in baseball. For all we know, there are teams that have learned from the relative clumsy efforts of filming on the sidelines to evolve their methods. We live in a world where a professional baseball team attempted to hack into the opponents computer systems. Grow up.

Carry on.

 
Yeah like I said back to normal.

Unbiased unnamed sources claiming new and exciting ways how the Pats cheated almost a decade ago.

It's like nothing has changed at all.

The difference being it's OTL reporting it. A branch of ESPN, a totally credible news outlet that isn't known for being a complete joke or anything.
Back to Normal.

Pats once again put back in their place (as lying cheats who have lost the respect of most of the non-Pats fan sports world) by realities that only foolish and blind fanatics could deny. Meanwhile, the rest of the universe, other players, coaches, fans, writers and most their collective role as writing history will recall this reality:

One of the best teams for a generation, that seemed to cheat literally the entire way, has forced what would have been one of if not the greatest legacy of success to become the byline of the story. A generation of cheating - which produced 4 (questionable, sadly) Super Bowl wins. Only leaves two real questions:

How many would the Pats have won without cheating (it could have been 2 or 3, I doubt 4 - but who knows, maybe you get 5 because of no distractions)? Unfortunately, because of your cheating, we will never know. Could have been more, and in a way, each you won is under a cloud of legit suspicion by 95% of the football universe.

Who else who may have deserved the win would actually be champion today, if not for the Pats cheating? Again, because of the Pats arrogance and continued, concerted effort to win at all costs, we won't know who actually DESERVED those wins.

We just have this awful feeling that the team that DID win, since they cheated (and likely in more ways than we know), shouldn't have.

See how it calls into question even the admitted success you have had? It's a sad tale. Great franchise. Repeatedly cheated and got caught. Fan base so in denial the rest of us can't even move on, because said foolish fan base really thinks they won on the up and up. When they didnt. They cheated and got caught. How much a fool does one have to be to not actually admit that. Oh, I guess we can see right here in this thread.

 
Koya I just want to say I hope you find happiness. You've posted about 35 times now about how sad this makes you. It's okay buddy, better days are coming.

 
Historical revisionists
Irony of ironies!

Does your version of history, where the Pats are not under a cloud of having constantly cheated, really work when the only people that actually believe it are Pats fans themselves and maybe a spattering of others?

I mean, almost the ENTIRE football universe acknowledged that the Pats are cheaters and repeatedly so. Like, almost everyone. Hell, some of the respected people out there (Peyton fearing wiretaps - BUT THERE ARE NO RULES AGAINST WIRETAPS!! (says the pathetic pats fan who can't admit the truth! - Shula's comments) have flat out called it out as almost everyone sees it.

So enjoy this little circle of denial you all have. Go anywhere outside of the arrogant cocoon of the Pats org and its lemmings, we all call it like the REAL history was.

Only people revising are you - and you feel better because a message board, and your work place and bars become echo chambers of denial - but the rest of the world, and history forever forward, will view this team as a cheater who's success at the least comes with some doubt. And their actions will be judged as sad, petty and utterly undeserving of either respect, or the world champion.

Enjoy the bed you mad Pats... and enjoy your little circles of "history" Pats fans. If it makes you feel better to ignore the rest of the nation and the football world - and history - calling you all as the cheaters and deniers as the facts have shown true.

 
Koya I just want to say I hope you find happiness. You've posted about 35 times now about how sad this makes you. It's okay buddy, better days are coming.
Meh, I type a hundred words a minute.

It's fun to keep watching a fan base get so up in arms about something the rest of the world already knows, but they won't admit.

And yes, come Thursday better games are coming. Unfortunately I missed out on Gronk or Brady or I'd be cheering for the cheating to continue (as if its not!)

PS - Plus, baiting a fantatical crew of historical deniers can be fun. Not that different than the FFA. Of course, I am not trying to protect a legacy that has long since been destroyed, so I guess I can understand why folks seems to just jump right up and fastidiously respond to my latest barb - barbs that generally only come in reaction to yet another laughable insinuation by a Pats fan that the obvious cheating didn't occur.

So I lob some water balloons and they jump in the tanks. Even though their war is already lost and all the ammo is out - the Pats are cheaters regardless what the hold out fanatics say.

 
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So according to unnamed sources, the Patriot sent in "low level employees" to steal play sheets. I'm picturing 19 year olds wearing those glasses with the fake nose and mustache whistling casually as they run a mop through the visitor's locker room, stuffing game scripts that are laying around into their back pocket.

 
I'm almost ready to fire up the grill and provide premium steaks and alcohol and have a bunch of old timers from the Cowboys, Niners, Steelers, Broncos or other teams to hear stories about the stuff their teams did "back in the day." Everyone would have a good laugh about the stuff that went down.

 
In his autobiography, Landry described the league’s flirtation with radio communication between coaches and the quarterback in 1956. The Giants were playing the Cleveland Browns, and Paul Brown, Cleveland’s head coach, was sending play calls electronically to George Ratterman, his quarterback.“As soon as the game began, our rookie end Bob Topp donned the earphones and tuned our radio to the Cleveland frequency,” Landry wrote. Brown’s play call would be relayed to Landry in time for him to make adjustments on the field. By the time Brown realized that he was being overheard, the Giants had run up an insurmountable lead.
 
"Yeah, the early part of the century was pretty nuts. We used to get outraged like these punks today wouldn't even know. Some guys used to get outraged five, six times a day. One guy used to say if he didn't wonder what he was going to tell his kids before lunch he'd just stay in bed."

 
Adam Harstad said:
JuniorNB said:
Cheating is cheating. Whether it's taking performance enhancing drugs or having your team camera guys dress like their from NFL Films so the other teams don't know your filming their practices or instructing your ball boys to let air out the game balls after the referees inspect them. It doesn't matter how you cheat. People hate cheaters. I'm just trying to explain to you why so many people hate your team. Because you seem confused into thinking it's because they've been successful. People didn't hate the 49ers in the 80's. Or the Jordan Bulls. Or Tiger Woods (pre womanizing scandal). Winning doesn't make you hated. Cheating constantly, and having a smug attitude about it, is why your team is hated by the other teams and their fans.
The 49ers in the '80s cheated, too, though.

Anarchy99 said:
bostonfred said:
Anarchy99 said:
If cheating is cheating, then there are a lot of teams in many leagues and many sports that have cheated. If all 32 NFL teams were have found to have done something against the rules, then what? Would people label all 32 teams as cheaters? Or at that point would there be different gradations of cheating? Or would certain things be overlooked for some teams but not for others?
Someone should put together a web site with a list of all the teams and the times they've been caught cheating
That would be considered propaganda and severely one-sided to deflect attention away from the biggest cheating team in sports history.
In fairness, the website in question positively reeks of yellow journalism. I'm firmly on board the "everyone cheats" bandwagon, and I love taking a look back at stuff like this through history. But pretending that the Broncos version of Spygate, (which as far as we know lasted one game, wasn't used, and for which every participant was fired as soon as the owner learned) was somehow worse than the Patriots version is absurd. That's taking a good idea in theory and ruining it in practice.

I'd love to read a really good, objective book on cheating in football through history. Some of the stories I've seen are amazing. Like Pop Warner having pouches sewn on the back of his jerseys and telling his players to tuck the football into them so the other team couldn't tell who had it.
I think this broaches an interesting and important component of this discussion.

Unfortunately, so many seem to want to ignore the need for nuance.

There is gamesmanship, skirting the line, cheating, blatant cheating. Some of those efforts are individual, some a team/organizational effort. It can be equipment based (stickum, grease the Jersey), trying to skirt the rules (illegal formation) etc - of course, most / many of these also have clear punishments, usually in game (15 yards, etc).

That said, at some point you have to recognize a pattern of repeated organizational attempts not to skirt rules, but to get an advantage outside the bounds of any reasonable sportsmanship, and to call into question the very integrity of the game is far beyond that.

I'd also strongly separate "cheating" on the field, even stealing of signs on that day etc, as if it's in plain view, like baseball, I feel there's a responsibility to mask communication. But when you step off the field, use staff, filming and other equipment and a number of efforts that seam quite literally more like STEALING than cheating (whatever it takes to know another teams playbook, regardless of how it's obtained).

And for anyone, Pats fan or otherwise, to suggest that there has not been a good amount of cheating already exposed, is simply keeping their head in the ground.

 
So according to unnamed sources, the Patriot sent in "low level employees" to steal play sheets. I'm picturing 19 year olds wearing those glasses with the fake nose and mustache whistling casually as they run a mop through the visitor's locker room, stuffing game scripts that are laying around into their back pocket.
Sounds par for the course for this team. Sadly, I'd expect it, more than I'd expect it to not be happening in some way.

 
No one benefits from something like this......................its sad, a great product so tapered the fox hole is deep I'm sure.

 
And for anyone, Pats fan or otherwise, to suggest that there has not been a good amount of cheating already exposed, is simply keeping their head in the ground.
Wake up dude. A federal judge just exonerated them of all wrong doing. All of it.

 
You used to be able to pick up a QB and slam him head-first into the turf too. But today you're not. Rules and their application change over time.

HTH

 
People cheated in the 50s....so its ok now.

Got it.

Oh...and Jerry Rice.
It's more about cheating being eternal, and the Pats not being exceptional.

edit: That's more about the ESPN piece, which moves things beyond Defategate.

 
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Yeah like I said back to normal.

Unbiased unnamed sources claiming new and exciting ways how the Pats cheated almost a decade ago.

It's like nothing has changed at all.

The difference being it's OTL reporting it. A branch of ESPN, a totally credible news outlet that isn't known for being a complete joke or anything.
I don't think anything in the article will impact how Patriots fans see their team.
You are absolutely correct. There is absolutely nothing that will ever get them to see what everyone else sees. Actually, they see it and they know the same thing that all of us know. But admitting it soils their Lombardis, so they can't do that.
Exactly, while they won't admit it it is as clear to them their organization has been overrun by cheating scumbags.

 
And for anyone, Pats fan or otherwise, to suggest that there has not been a good amount of cheating already exposed, is simply keeping their head in the ground.
Wake up dude. A federal judge just exonerated them of all wrong doing. All of it.
Kinda liking this approach...
If you are going to be an ignorant fanboy, might as well go all in?'

When all logic fails, you can embrace the truth and reality - or decide to lose all touch with it. Have to say, it must be a nice place to be. Thinking you have 4 Super Bowl wins and the respect of the football world would be a pretty sweet deal.

I guess the Steelers are the closest thing we've got. :shudders:

 
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I request a Title Change:

Patiots being Investigated ________.

Let's be honest, when someone has been caught this many times, you know there is a lot more ugliness of past transgressions to arise. And, seeing as we are also talking last year, it doesn't seem they will stop cheating any time soon. Let's keep things open ended, shall we?

 
I don't think koya read the ruling. With Cruz and jpp sharing 19 fingers and three patellas you probably haven't enjoyed reading about football this off season, but a judge literally just totally exonerated them of all wrong doing. You're just making yourself look foolish in here.

Just trying to help.

 
I don't think koya read the ruling. With Cruz and jpp sharing 19 fingers and three patellas you probably haven't enjoyed reading about football this off season, but a judge literally just totally exonerated them of all wrong doing. You're just making yourself look foolish in here.

Just trying to help.
You mean the last decade plus of demonstrated cheating? Or this latest transgression? Errr, alleged.

Honestly, I haven't even had a chance to read up on this playsheet stealing. I can only judge by the historical record that it would not be surprising, at the least, if not sorta expected.

 
PS - If the literal litany of cheats has been shown to be ALL a lie, and the Pats actually are an upstanding organization that deserves fair respect and honor for their, now unblemished, accomplishments, please show me the text.

I'll gladly anoint them the greatest organizational dynasty of our time and apologize for my harsh words in the face of all this cheating being a ruse.

 
People cheated in the 50s....so its ok now.

Got it.

Oh...and Jerry Rice.
It's more about cheating being eternal, and the Pats not being exceptional.

edit: That's more about the ESPN piece, which moves things beyond Defategate.
I've said this before, I firmly believe the Pats ARE exceptional at cheating; taking it to a level NEVER done before in the NFL. And frankly, why not just own that for bragging rights? You can say that you are both the best evah on the field and in cheating (and of course the "cheating never really helped because everyone does/did" it is still your cover).

 
I've said this before, I firmly believe the Pats ARE exceptional at cheating; taking it to a level NEVER done before in the NFL. And frankly, why not just own that for bragging rights? You can say that you are both the best evah on the field and in cheating (and of course the "cheating never really helped because everyone does/did" it is still your cover).
But...if the Pats are that good at cheating, how come they keep getting caught?

 
I've said this before, I firmly believe the Pats ARE exceptional at cheating; taking it to a level NEVER done before in the NFL. And frankly, why not just own that for bragging rights? You can say that you are both the best evah on the field and in cheating (and of course the "cheating never really helped because everyone does/did" it is still your cover).
But...if the Pats are that good at cheating, how come they keep getting caught?
deja vu

 
Good points... the kid in the disguise sent into the locker room is pure genius! SO many Raider, Jets, Steelers fans etc are so butthurt. Knowing that Brady is the best ever and that he'll be around for 3-5 more years... how many more will he win? One, two... three? I guarantee you he is devising flaming mad baller super advanced cheating techniques as we speak. And ironically, there's nothing anyone can do, not even the commish, to stop him or the Patriots. It's like a runaway locomotive OF GREATNESS!!!!! WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS... my friend. WE"LL KEEP ON FIGHTING... to the end....

 
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Good points... the kid in the disguise sent into the locker room is pure genius! SO many Raider, Jets, Steelers fans etc are so butthurt. Knowing that Brady is the best ever and that he'll be around for 3-5 more years... how many more will he win? One, two... three? I guarantee you he is devising flaming mad baller super advanced cheating techniques as we speak. And ironically, there's nothing anyone can do, not even the commish, to stop him or the Patriots. It's like a runaway locomotive OF GREATNESS!!!!! WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS... my friend. WE"LL KEEP ON FIGHTING... to the end....
As a Ravens fan, I am getting skeered about Brady scorching the earth...6 yards at a time.

 
I don't think koya read the ruling. With Cruz and jpp sharing 19 fingers and three patellas you probably haven't enjoyed reading about football this off season, but a judge literally just totally exonerated them of all wrong doing. You're just making yourself look foolish in here.

Just trying to help.
I have to hand it to Kraft. Despite a judge exonerating them of any wrongdoing, he's still donating two of this year's draft choices back to the league. He's such a good sport. Lol
 
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