There has to be more to the Spygate story
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| Bill Belichick isn't out of the woods yet and could face additional discipline from the NFL. (Elsa / Getty Images) |
Does the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania have a Spygate agenda? All politicians have an agenda. If you didn't know that already, you sure found out while watching Congress part like the Red Sea over the identity of the substance Brian McNamee injected into Rocket Clemens' behind.
It's easy to paint Specter as a cartoonish Eagles fan still peeved about the Patriots' triumph over Philly in Super Bowl XXXIX, and as a self-serving senator with strong financial ties to Comcast, a prominent NFL antagonist.
Just as easy as it was to paint Jose Canseco as a raving fool when he first declared, way back when, that the vast majority of baseball games had been reduced to back-room battles of lawless pharmacology.
But in the not-too-distant future, Specter might be busy accepting thanks for helping to expose a dynasty as something of a fraud.
Here's why: Matt Walsh has to have something. He absolutely, positively has to possess some piece of evidence on the Patriots' illegal taping of opponents' signals that Bill Belichick wants revealed as much as he wants his playbook in the public domain.
Would Walsh's lawyer waste all this time and energy and make such a grand back-and-forth fuss negotiating indemnification terms with the NFL if his client is only ready to testify that Tom Brady should've been picked earlier than the sixth round?
Yes, it's possible Walsh has nothing to convince the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, to add to the Spygate penalties — a $500,000 fine for Belichick, a $250,000 fine for the Patriots, and the forfeiture of a first-round draft pick. It's possible Walsh is nothing more than an attention hound making a play for his 15 minutes of Warholesque fame, an assistant golf pro who wants to be as famous as Tiger Woods for a few glorious weeks.
It's more likely he's a former low-level Patriots aide who played some below-board Patriot games that would widen the league's investigation and take it places commissioner Goodell never wanted it to go.
The commissioner made the decision to destroy the tapes in question, and his stated reasons for doing so have never jibed with common sense. Goodell destroyed evidence in a case he himself said could be reopened. Why in the world would anyone do that?
Maybe because it's not in the NFL's interest to have its most successful franchise sullied beyond recognition.
Common sense suggests Goodell got rid of the Spygate tapes because he wanted to get rid of Spygate. The commissioner might as well have been Lady Macbeth trying to clean imaginary blood from her hands.
Goodell figured the more he talked about how unprecedented his penalties were in the Patriots case, the less likely the scandal would spin out of his control. If any Matt Walshes were out there lurking in the shadows, Goodell hoped they would be completely ignored.
But Specter wouldn't let Spygate die a quick and quiet death. Even when New England's bid for a historic 19-0 season was rejected by the Giants in the Arizona desert, cooling the white-hot lights trained on the Patriots, Specter kept on blitzing.
That heat and a Boston Herald report stating the Patriots had illegally taped the Rams' walkthrough prior to Super Bowl XXXVI conspired to force Belichick to finally address the allegations for public consumption.
"In my entire coaching career," he would say, "I've never seen another team's practice film prior to playing that team. I have never authorized, or heard of, or even seen in any way, shape or form any other team's walkthrough."
Belichick maintained he merely misinterpreted the rule prohibiting coaches from taping signals during games, a claim Goodell couldn't accept. Walsh might have some evidence suggesting that Belichick misinterpreted the way Andy Pettitte allegedly "misremembered."
This isn't about the 2007 Patriots anymore, the perfect team leveled by the perfect Giants storm. It's not about the Patriots team that deserved an asterisk, Don Shula said, before the old coach started backpedaling faster than a cornerback covering Randy Moss.
This is about the Patriots team that won three Super Bowls before it lost one.
"Do I think the Eagles were cheated out of the Super Bowl in 2005?" Specter told the Philadelphia Daily News last month. "I don't know but I want to find out, and there are some people who know the answer."
Specter wasn't reserving his conspiracy theories for the hometown team. He said he wanted to know if St. Louis got screwed, too.
"According to Mike Martz, the Rams' coach," Specter said, "the Patriots knew all their signals ... when they were within 20 yards of the touchdown. You have Kurt Warner, who was the quarterback, thinking there ought to be an investigation of that. I think that there ought to be one, too."
The blitz got to the quarterback. Goodell agreed to meet with Specter, and still couldn't get the senator to pull back.
"There were a great many questions answered by Commissioner Goodell," Specter said after the 100-minute meeting. "I found a lot of questions unanswerable because the tapes and notes had been destroyed."
Goodell could still suspend Belichick for a year if he discovers the coach wasn't truthful about the extent of his cheating. In a memo to his competition committee, the commissioner declared the league and its teams needed to move swiftly to eliminate signal stealing. Again, it wasn't enough to make Spygate go poof in the night.
Now Matt Walsh is getting ready to tell NFL officials everything he knows about the Patriots' way of doing gameday business. There should be an independent investigator or three in the room, if Goodell is serious about preserving the league's credibility and taking the Spygate case wherever it leads.
When Walsh is done talking, Belichick might require an asterisk of Barry Bonds proportions.
And Arlen Specter might look a whole lot better than he does right now.
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