The elephant in the stadium: Spygate's cloud of innuendo still dogs Patriots
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INDIANAPOLIS -- Mike Tomlin calls it the sticky Lombardi because of all the handprints that stick to the trophy after the NFL commissioner awards it to the new Super Bowl champions.
Many believe the three Lombardi Trophies previously won by the New England Patriots remain sticky for other reasons and that perhaps Roger Goodell should have dusted them for fingerprints rather than destroy the evidence of wrongdoing that helped produce that cache.
Spygate, they called it. Coach Bill Belichick's Patriots were caught redhanded in 2007 secretly taping opponents' coaches' hand signals and, presumably, matching them with video cutups of plays in order for New England's defense to know which offensive play was coming.
That violated NFL policy, and Goodell fined Belichick the maximum of $500,000, fined the Patriots $250,000 and docked them a first-round draft choice in 2008. Then the commissioner destroyed the evidence, the tapes that prompted him to levy the punishment. One theory is that those tapes may have provided such clear evidence of cheating that to be made public would be to forever call in question New England's three Super Bowl victories. So Goodell pulled his Rosemary Woods and erased them.
"This episode represents a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid longstanding rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field," Goodell wrote in a letter to the Patriots explaining his disciplinary action.
The Patriots shrugged that off in 2007 and became the first team to go 16-0 and won two more in the playoffs but were upset by the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII.
Both teams have returned here for a rematch in XLVI. It's a chance for the Patriots to cleanse themselves, to put a clean Lombardi next to the sticky ones in their trophy case.
The stigma of possibly winning those first three under a cloud of cheating remains. Belichick declined to answer questions about it here, but others have no problem doing so.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
