So, Bill Belichick has been fined half a million for the incident last week in which a Patriots assistant coach was caught videotaping Jets signals. The team was also fined $250K, and will lose at least one draft pick over the incident.
Now that the punishment has been handed down, can somebody explain to me why this is such a huge deal?
I mean, maybe it’s just that the sports I played regularly (basketball, rugby, soccer) are much less pattern-driven than football, but I really don’t see what’s so utterly terrible about this business. It’s not like they sent a spy to the Jets’ practice facility, or something– they were taping signals while the game was in progress, signals that presumably were visible or audible to players on both teams anyway.
So what’s the big deal? Players try to figure out signals on the fly all the time– lots of guys would work hard to try to decipher the other team’s line-out calls when I played rugby (I never really bothered, as I could almost always beat my opposite straight up), and we always made some effort to keep track of plays called in from the sideline when I played basketball. Frankly, I’d be astonished if the army of assistant coaches in the NFL didn’t include somebody whose game-day job was to try to figure out the other team’s calls.
But really, that makes surprisingly little difference, at least in my preferred sports. Even if you know where the ball is going to go, you still need to make a play to stop it, and the other guy still has a chance to make a play in spite of the defense. This isn’t some sort of deterministic card game, where knowing the next play is completely decisive– it’s an athletic contest, and the players on the field still have to execute the plays.
But you’ve got every talking head in the world ranting about how corrupt the Patriots are, and today, you have John Clayton denouncing the penalty as too light. And I really don’t see the scandal.
So, somebody who’s outraged by this, what’s the big deal? Apparently, it hinges on the use of videotape, but I don’t see how that makes it any worse. So they’ll have the signals on tape– big deal. Maybe that would help in the next game, provided that the Jets coaching staff isn’t paranoid enough to change their signals around anyway, just on principle.
I almost feel like the disproportionate response from the sports media is just payback for Belichick being grumpy and uninteresting as a head coach. He doesn’t really play the 24-hour-news-cycle game, refusing to provide many colorful quotes for media stories and blatantly lying in injury reports and the like. He’s not a real outgoing guy, and can’t be bothered to pretend to care about the sports media, and now that they have a chance to stick it to him, they’re all leaping on it. You see this all the time, especially in New York and Boston.
But I dunno. Maybe there’s something substantial here that I’m just not seeing. So, can anybody convince me that this is really significant?