With critics like these, who needs friends?

Alright, here’s the inevitable blog post about the great Patriots videotaping scandal. The following was mostly typed up last night, as the Pats beat the stuffing out of the Chargers on national TV.

Perhaps this reveals something unflattering about me, but the more attention this gets the less serious a story it appears to be. Specifically, the more I read people criticize Belichick and the Patriots the worse their case looks.

I will start by making a number of observations of context, and then add some speculation and opinion.

Context (all of which I believe to be factual, although I am prepared to be wrong):

1 - In the wake of the commissioner's ruling, the Patriot’s activity clearly violated league rules

2 - Every NFL team has multiple cameras taking still photographs and videotape of games in progress to help the coaching staff make real-time adjustments. I have seen what I understand to be these cameras and video recorders above the field over the end zones and above the field along the sidelines. The photos and video they produce clearly capture the opposing sidelines and the opposing team's coaches.

3 - A large number, if not all, NFL teams make at least periodic attempts to steal opposing signals and anticipate opposing plays. I have repeatedly seen NFL teams use multiple people to deliver defensive signals from the sidelines so that they can disguise who is delivering the right signals. The fact that this is regular practice would suggest to me that teams anticipate that they will be observed and have devolved routine practices to thwart these efforts. Along these lines: teams reportedly change their signals from week to week and sometimes from half to half to prevent detection

4 - At this point in his career, Bill Belichick has a clear reputation as an incredibly competitive, intelligent and driven person who is perfectly willing to defy conventional wisdom in order to gain an advantage on the field. There have been a number of things the Patriots have done over the years that have caused some NFL purists in and out of the media to cluck their tongues and complain that the team just isn't playing the game 'the right way'. One relevant example, of many: several years ago (after yet another playoff loss) a number of Colts players and coaches complained loudly about how physical Patriots DBs were playing Colts WRs near the line of scrimmage. Such activity, they observed, was against the rules and the Pats shouldn't do it. Lots of press coverage ensued focused on whether or not the Patriots were 'dirty', 'cheaters', and/or 'couldn't win if they played fair'. It also became clear that while the playbook set one standard for what DBs could do, NFL refs were overwhelmingly consistent in calling a different standard on the field. This last fact was common knowledge enough to be regularly mentioned by sports journalists.

5 - Belichick began his career as a scout and still does an unusually large amount of scouting compared to the tasks commonly done by other head coaches. When he was coming up through the ranks Belichick developed a reputation for anticipating what other teams were going to do before they did it. For years players have said things about Belichick like 'he tells us the week before the game how the other team will play in different situations and then they do exactly what he said they would' and 'our coaching staff explains the other team so well we know their game plan better then the players on the other side'. Halberstam's book on Belichick included a least one story relayed from someone who sat in the stands next to Belichick when he was a young scout and listened to him predict, play after play, exactly what the team he was scouting was going to do before it happened.

6 - There is a great deal of resentment around the league over the Pat's consistent success. There is resentment of Belichick personally among coaches and players he has defeated, resentment among those loyal to the people he has defeated, and resentment among those who dislike his poor people skills, lack of charisma, and unwillingness to schmooze his peers and the press in the manner of other coaches (within the NFL Bill Parcells, Jimmy Johnson and John Gruden come to mind; locally Doc Rivers seem to walk on water as far as the sports media is concerned). Belichick's (lack of) popularity on this front is not helped by his image as an intellectual in a sport whose culture can be strongly anti-intellectual. A certain number of people in the NFL don't see it as admirable to beat another team by being smarter then them. Consistently positive converage of the Pats by folks like Len Pasquarelli and John Clayton certainly are exceptions to this.

7 - Roger Goodell is both relatively new at his job in the league office and appears highly motivated to crack down on discrepancies between the official rules and what actually goes on around the league. The penalties handed down in the Pacman Jones and Michael Vick cases were both seen as severe and unprecedented given the nature of the infractions.

8 - In the wake of the NBA officiating scandal that broke a month ago the sports media is to some degree primed and attentive to stories about this kind of illicit activity.



Speculation / opinion:

A - One of the hallmarks of Belichick's time as a head coach has been his willingness to be unconventional in pursuit of on-field advantage. A number of times (e.g. the Colts example, above) Belichick appears to have observed a difference between the official rules and the rules that were enforced, and prepared his team to take advantage of the game as it was actually called, instead of the way it was supposed to be called. A certain number of Belichick's successes as a coach and a GM have been based on recognizing and acting on situations where conventional wisdom doesn't best prepare a team to win.

B - The degree to which a DB can push a WR-- or the kind of equipment a team can have on the sidelines-- both seem to me like the kinds of operating standards that are equally clear to every team. Put another way, refs and officials have not been enforcing the rules in a manner preferential to the Pats and the situations in question were entirely transparent to those paying attention. It is hard to imagine an area under more extensive observation-- by dozens of cameras and hundreds of team employees-- then a football field and sidelines during an NFL game. It is hard to see this as clandestine activity. When the story broke It appears to have been an open secret within the NFL and among sports journalists that multiple NFL teams have been doing stuff like this for years, suggesting that Belichick's actions were neither unique nor based on an un-level playing field.

C - I suspect that Belichick perceived that the rule regarding videotaping of the far sideline was poorly if ever enforced, and took advantage of the opportunity this presented. Coaches that knew the rules and were paying attention seem to have taken actions to keep this from happening (e.g. as Mangini did, calling in security to remove the cameraman; or in the reported incident in Green Bay or Minnesota last year). Those that didn't or weren't, did not (e.g. as in the Matt Millen quotes in the article linked, below). I suspect Belichick would consider this an example of the difference between coaches who are both good at their jobs and well prepared for games, and those who are not. To me, that somebody like Matt Millen remains ignorant of NFL rules at this point does more to strengthen widespread rumors of his stupidity and incompetence then they do to make Belichick look bad.

D - Goodell probably assumes that there is a lot more going on around the league then he can realistically uncover and respond to more discreetly. By coming down like the wrath of God on Belichick and the Patriots, however, he sends a powerful signal to the entire league that bending or dodging the rules will not be tolerated, whether or not those rules have been consistently monitored or enforced in the past.

E - If anything, the Patriots success over this last decade increases the incentive by Goodell to make the penalty significant. It sends the message 'nobody is above the law, not even the most successful franchise in the league'.

F - In light of all the above, the media coverage of this story feels like it has been somewhere between four and five times the noise level warranted. It has provided lots of people an opportunity to take shots at the Patriots, under the guise of 'standing up for the integrity of the game'. Some of the resulting articles (this bit of idiocy from Dr Z comes to mind, linked on Bill Simmon's page) have taken the apparent position that 'cheating was noble and admirable when the people doing it were stupid and clumsy' while using the occasion to vent what comes across as a lot of largely irrelevant anti-Belichick spite. In the Dr Z piece, for example, Zimmerman fantasizes about sending Belichick to prison for a few weeks (or alternatively having him publicly whipped and put in the stocks), gushes about how much fun he’s having fantasizing about the punishment Belichick will get from the league, and repeatedly gloats about how much he's enjoying seeing 'the mighty Patriots brought down to earth'. This while painting a rosy picture of the good old days when the person he calls 'the king of cheaters', Al Davis, pushed the envelope in all sorts of other ways. The overall picture that develops from this article is not so much of Belichick’s actions as unusual or criminal (to borrow the word in the headline), but of Paul Zimmerman as the sort of bitter hypocrite who doesn't care so much about the way the game 'ought to be played' as about whether the people he likes come out on top.

Lots of the Patriot’s critics might prefer a league in which plenty of people cheated, but only in simple-minded and feeble ways. To use an example Zimmerman fondly waxes nostalgic over: by having a large former offensive lineman get on the other team’s bus, presumably in hopes of overhearing state secrets without getting noticed. It seems to me that to these folks Belichick’s great crime is not that so much he pushes the envelope in search of ways to give his team the advantage, but that he is so intelligent and creative in how he goes about it.

Was this incident against league rules, and was Goodell right to punish the Patriots? Clearly, yes and yes. In addition, against the charges of competitiveness, intelligence and drive Belichick can only plead ‘guilty’, and I see no reason to expect any of those things to change. If the league has decided to get serious about enforcing certain rules that they have not previously paid much attention to, I expect Bill to go about beating other teams in different ways.

Get ready for another long year, guys.