New England Patriots newly accused of Watergate-style NFL cheating

By Will Stabley | September 8, 2015

The good news for the New England Patriots didn’t last long. Star quarterback Tom Brady saw his suspension nullified by a judge last week, freeing him up to play at the start of the NFL season this weekend. But now the Patriots is being accused of a vast network of cheating dating back several years which allegedly involved everything from breaking into hotel rooms to steal opposing playbooks, to sending team employees in disguised as maintenance workers. The accusation extends to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who is said to have known about it all and have covered it up. Even as these new claims reach a level of Watergate-style breadth and seeming paranoia, they’re not coming out of left field. The accusations are coming directly from ESPN.

The story goes that the Patriots routinely stole the playbooks of players from other teams, either by sneaking into opposing locker rooms or by burglarizing their hotel rooms. This allegedly went on for the better part of a decade, and it was so rampant that other NFL teams were resorting to planting phony playbooks in plain sight in the hopes that the Pats employees would mistakenly steal those instead. The allegations also include the claim that the “Spygate” scandal wasn’t just a few games as claimed, but instead that the team videotaped so many other teams practicing that it dedicated an entire room to housing a library of the tapes so they could be accessed and studied before facing each team.

Furthermore the ESPN report alleges that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell became aware of all of the above and decided to destroy the evidence while floating a cover story of much lesser wrongdoing, apparently our of a desire to hide the fact that a team which won three Super Bowls in four years had severely cheated in order to pull it off. Goodell has previously admitted to having destroyed all Spygate evidence without giving a reason. He was also more recently accused of ignoring or burying video evidence in the Ray Rice investigation.

The New England Patriots have put out a statement today denying the allegations being made by ESPN. However the NFL owners will have little choice but to investigate the matter fully, and this time they won’t be able to use favored investigator Ted Wells, whose independence was discredited by the judge in the DeflateGate case. It’s not clear whether the matter could bring more career jeopardy to Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, who has been routinely accused of cheating over the years and has admitted to it once, or commissioner Roger Goodell, who increasingly appears to be equal parts corrupt and inept.