Not at all, but some think that any sort of videotaping or picture or note taking is not allowed- its just the when and what and where. Aerial photos of in game formations is allowed, which has to be more helpful than anything pre-game.
It’s like someone being all up in arms if you got fired from your job for stealing, when your job allows stealing, just not on Thursday, the day you stole, and not pens but pencils. Dumb analogy I know, but its all I could come up with.
I guess their tape of the Giants wasn’t too good.
Or it’s harder to win a Super Bowl if you don’t tape…
Wow, talk about a double-edged sword. Okay, justice was served, good triumped over evil, etc. But Shibboleth, Hubzilla, you brought it up yourself: Does this Spygate thing have any traction at all anymore? The other AFC playoff teams might have a beef, but I doubt anyone’s listening.
Besides that, knowing how trumping up a scandal can galvanize and motivate a team, you think there’ll be a rush to do it now? Especially since the scandal’s several months old by now and there isn’t much chance of any new smoking gun showing up? Re-fire up the juggernaut (which’ll be hungrier than ever with the humiliation of a Super Bowl loss) and get spanked even worse next time for no benefit whatsoever. Yeah, that’ll happen.
Face it…it’s OVER. There will be no asterisks, there will be no big suspensions or fines, and Tom Brady will not be placed in stocks for you to throw rotten fruit at. Take that to the bank.
Not true. If Bellichek was betting on his team to win a football game, he would still have a priority of winning the game, maybe even more so than without the wager. And he would still be banned for life.
Isn’t this the same Arlen Specter who was involved in the Warren Commission, and all the associated issues with suppressing evidence?
So if for example they call in Tom Brady and he says he never knew of any illegal taping and never benefited from it and it turns out he did, he could go to jail like Marion Jones? 
That’s because if he did that and happened to lose, the door is now open for him to be pressured. Lose a couple bets, fall a little behind, and now your bookie approaches you and says hey, forget about your balance, how about you just shave some points? You’re favored anyway; just win by less than the spread. Your debt will be cleared, you still win, everybody wins.
See how easy that step is? The next one and the one after that are just as easy. Gambling on your own sport is one of the slippery-est slopes in the land. That’s why everyone agrees there should be a zero tolerance approach taken to discourage it.
His priority would be to win a particular game for his own financial benefit, not winning in such a way as to put the team in the best condition for future games. Keeping a star player in (and risking injury) when the game is already won because you need to make the spread, for example.
Teams don’t show anything on their walkthroughs, especially if they are playing a road game and practicing in the other teams facility. They just don’t do it, for obvious reasons.
Or the taping really didn’t help them much to begin with and they were really that good of a team on their own merits and fell just short of history to a team that refused to be cowed into not being physical.
And boy am I happy with the outcome…I hate the Patsies, and not because they were taping (which franky, I firmly believe all other teams do or have done, Bellicheat just got caught), but because they have been hogging the wins and subsequent media attention that goes along with it for too long.
But the question Pats supporters are still not answering is if there was no advantage in doing it WHY did they keep doing it? :dubious: Obviously Bellicheck felt there was enough value in it to risk a $750,000 fine and a first round draft pick even after being REPEATEDLY warned not to do it, and the NFL felt it was serious enough to levy such a huge consequence.
Because he ignored the league. As you may have noticed from his press conferences, the guy takes arrogance to a new level.
The way I see it, most clubs probably did this kind of taping all the time. (Jimmy Johnson and Howie Long have both said that it was common.) So Belichick does this for years, no harm no foul. Now a new commissioner takes over, and after seeing his crackdown on the players, I have no doubt that Goodell sent an avalanche of memos to all the teams regarding all sorts of crap, ranging from critically important to trifling minutia.
So in this pile of TPS reports, Belichick sees the one saying not to tape anymore. He figures, yeah, whatever, I’m doing what I’ve always done. Who is this friggin’ guy anyway? What’s he gonna do, cry?
That’s my take on it. Also, (not just) you are fond of the “why risk a first round draft pick and $750k fine?” argument, but that isn’t an argument you can use unless Belichick is clairvoyant. Nobody knew what the penalty would be. Some initial speculation was that it could be as low as a single 7th round pick with no fine. That of course changed when the media and public got sand in their vaginas about the horrible awful unthinkable despicable"cheating".
If he wants to swear an oath to give truthful testimony, then lie, yeah, he gets to go to jail. Whether or not you think this is any of the Senate’s business (I don’t) when you go in front of them, and swear to tell the truth under penalty of perjury, you tell the truth or you go to jail.
I keep reading that the NFL has a monopoly of some sort which would give them the right. I admit I don’t understand how the XFL came into being if that’s the case (plus I saw a draft on ESPN the other day for another new football league, wish I could remember the name of it).
I think all of this goes away if they allow a defensive player to have a headset in his helmet. That way they aren’t passing defensive calls in in a visual manner that the offense can read.