Patriots Sued Over Super Bowl Loss

Pats, Kraft, Belichick sued for $100M
Former Ram seeks compensation for Super Bowl loss.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A lawsuit filed Friday by a former St. Louis Rams player and others seeks millions of dollars in damages from the alleged taping of Rams practices by the New England Patriots before the 2002 Super Bowl.

The $100 million suit, filed on behalf of former Rams player Willie Gary in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, names the Patriots, team owner Robert Kraft and head coach Bill Belichick.

Source

As much as I dislike the Pats... this is just silly.

:shk:

I think it's legitimate. The rams lost a lot of money in addition to glory by losing that superbowl. All the advertisements, appearances, etc. that would have followed after that superbowl likely would have netted the players millions. the merchandise would have netted the team millions. Then you think that maybe Warner's hall of fame resume looks a little bit better with two superbowl wins and two superbowl mvp's. They may have cost him his spot in canton.

There's just one little hitch: there's no proof.

All this talk about cheating is ridiculous. Do you know why Mangini called out the Pats cameras? Because during the final regular season game the year before, Belichik told the Jets he wasn't going to allow them to have their cameras on the field. Typically teams have cameras on the field, hence why coaches cover their mouth and do what they can to keep plays a secret.

Plus the cameras were removed in the first quarter. The Pats went on to go 18-1. Belichik just outcoaches his opponents (usually).

Originally posted by Megaton
There's just one little hitch: there's no proof.

I thought there was a tape.

I'm sure they all do some form of this, only the Pats got caught.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if this turned out to be true... However, without evidence, there is no case. - Signed, a Cowboys fan.... YEEEHAW!!!!

[edit on 22-2-2008 by SpeakerofTruth]

reply to post by Crakeur

Originally posted by Crakeur

Originally posted by Megaton
There's just one little hitch: there's no proof.

I thought there was a tape.

There was a tape. It was destroyed.

cbs3.com...

Is there a statute of limitations on these kind of things? If the various Rams personal suspected something in 2002 they should've raised it then. I can respect the dislike for the Pats and wanting to take them down a notch, however I feel that the Pats are merely the scapegoat of fans who are easily manipulated into focusing their disdain on the wrong target.

Teams realize that the opposing team will routinely try to steal each others defensive coaching signals, and that part of the challenge of coaching a team is to come up with ways to protect the secrets. Granted you're all sick of Pats fans rationalizing a bad situation, but I don't know anyone who doesn't admit this has been overblown. There's no way this case has any legs and it was the NFL who destroyed the tapes, not the Pats. This is a red-herring to distract from the real issues in the NFL and the Pats are an easy target due to many reasons which I'm sure nobody wants to hear.

Of all the unlikely commentators brought on MNF last season, Charles Barkley was probably the best (though that isn't saying much), and he provided one of my favorite comments in regards to Spygate, when he said something along the lines of how the other commentators would need to explain to him what the big deal is, since everyone knows everyone else's plays in the NBA.

Now I'm not so insane as to believe there is a 1:1 correlation between the NBA and the NFL, but to some degree, he did have a point. Taping practices and whatnot can only get you so far -- execution matters. Even if you know exactly whats about to go down, you can still get hosed.

I'll make another point that Kwyjibo sort of touched on, related to the Rams, playbooks, and coaching strategies...

First, NFL playbooks are often *huge.* Al Saunders's playbook is renowned for being among the largest ever compiled. I am pretty sure that Dick Vermeil used it when he was coached the Rams to their '99 Super Bowl victory, and I am completely certain that Vermeil said that it was well over 700-800 pages (see this article).

And now a story about my father... He coached football in various formats for nearly 20 years. He was among the most paranoid football coaches that I have ever known. Even when he was coaching mere High School football, he made it a point to practice plays that he had no intention of calling during the upcoming games. This was to hedge against the possibility that someone was watching and taking notes or video. To further complicate matters, he would use formations that looked exactly like the "fake" plays during games, often with the same motion patterns and such as that. If no one had been watching, then no harm and no foul; but, if any opposing defense relied on spying and adjusted accordingly to what they expected, they were going to get burned. And he was certainly not working with even a 100 page playbook.

So let's tie these two points together. In the NFL, with so many available plays in similar formations, I feel that the net effect of taping practices/walk-throughs/etc is minimal. Granted, Mike Martz (if memory serves) was coaching the Rams during the year that this supposedly went down and I doubt he was using the Saunders playbook, but it is a reasonable assumption that he too has a sufficiently large playbook. Any coach worth his salt should be hedging against the possibility of spying. If my father was doing it in regular season high school games, certainly it isn't a stretch to think that at least some NFL coaches regularly do these sorts of things.

All that being said... At the end of the day, it boils down to execution, to players outperforming other players. How many times last year was it absolutely obvious that Tom Brady was about to drop a long bomb to Randy Moss? And how many times did Moss burn multiple defenders to snag those passes? You can know precisely what is about to happen, but if the OL can consistently fend off the DL, and if your offensive players in general execute better than the defense, it doesn't matter if the defense knows what you're doing.

While I do have an issue with the ethical concerns related to spying in sports, I do not believe that you can attribute a Patriots victory over the Rams to a tape. The Rams lost that Super Bowl (and consequently money), because *they lost,* not because the Patriots watched some tape. The Rams were a good team that showed up and got outplayed. Ironically, this is exactly the situation in which the Patriots found themselves last season. They were a great team that was plagued by horrendous execution in the big game. Just my $0.02.

/tn.


[edit on 4-4-2008 by teleonaut]

[edit on 4-4-2008 by teleonaut]