If I were Bob Kraft, I would have agreed to fly him coach, and pulled strings to ensure he got a middle seat assignment. Just because.

Yes, yes I am a Pats fan, why do you ask? :)

What do you suppose Specter will get out of this? Maybe a double bogey?

As a long suffering Dolphins fan (gosh, what an odd ring that has) I've got to figure the Pats probably found no compelling reason to spy on us these past few years.

But if there's even an iota of evidence they pull this stuff on the Eagels before the Super Bowl between the two teams, watch out. Arlen Specter will have Belichick sent to the Canadian League via Gitmo!

Welcome, Dolphins and Patriots fans! I'm not sure why you'd spy on the Fish (sorry -- they'll be much better under Parcells; promise.) or the Jets. Football coaches can be so weird...paranoid, over-thinking, controlling...One would think that Belichick's guy wouldn't just do the taping on their own....

So where are all of you Patriots haters now that Matt the Ratt turned out to be full of hot air?

But wait! Some Patriots players actually asked the Ratt to sell some game tickets? We must have names! Any Patriots player found to have scalped a ticket must be banned from the league for life! Better yet, the New England Patriots should be banned from the NFL for all of eternity! Gillette Stadium should be razed to the ground, and salt mixed into the earth so nothing will grow there for a thousand years. Wait, I've got an even better idea...

This just in -- Matt the Ratt accuses Bill Belichick's grandmother of illegally removing the tag from a mattress! Ban the cheating Mrs. Belichick for life! The mere mention of her name is a stain upon the entire universe!

Grow up, you pathetic losers...

Hey, those mattress tags are there for a reason, Steve....

Mr. Walsh, your 15 minutes (103 days actually) of fame are now OFFICIALLY over!

Not yet. He hasn't had his moment with Arlen Specter yet.

Man, if only Goodell and the NFL front office would find a way to leak the San Diego tape! That would be worth dissecting on Fox Sports.

Are reporters so gullible as to believe that Goodell, when faced with the prospect of exposing systemic cheating that could call into serious question the outcome of games during the Patriot's first Super Bowl year and could give the NFL a black eye as big as Baseball's steroids scandal, is going to admit it?

It is entirely in Goodell's interest to dismissively downplay these tapes and everything that might cause people to look at how this affected the outcome of games back in 2001. Goodell destroyed -- I repeat DESTROYED -- the videotapes he recovered after the Jets' allegations surfaced, without letting anyone see them. He's no dummy - he fully understood that if those tapes were as innocuous as he suggested, that it was in his interest to show them to others, to verify his account. But he destroyed them instead.

And now an employee of an organization -- against the wrath of an entire region -- comes forward saying that admits, against his interest, that the Patriots taped other teams' hand signals, and Goodell wants everyone to believe this is no big deal -- that it's old news?

How f-ing naive are you reporters to simply accept Goodell's word? What, did you cover the White House in 2003? Are you reporters, or stenographers? Or are you so afraid of upsetting the powers that be at the NFL that you're afraid to ask difficult questions?

David, I don't think we're naive at all. We have all asked those questions, privately and publicly. The simple fact is that guy who is in charge of the investigation is the guy who's in charge of running the league. I love a good conspiracy theory and it isn't hard to imagine one in this case. But until Matt Walsh, or someone else with knowledge/evidence, speaks, the story isn't there. It's whispers.

I, myself, would be just as interested in Specter's ties to the whole Comcast/NFL controversy, since has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from Comcast and their legal team, and why he is so interested in NFL violations that he can use against their charter.

I believe one poster's comment about naivete would apply here.

Another question we have asked, Rich.

Another question, supposedly, Matt Walsh stole all the stuff he is now showing Goodell. So now do two wrongs make a right?

Also,

First of all, steroids were and are illegal. That makes use a rules and law violation.

Taping signals in a sports game is a rules violation. That doesn't make it illegal.

Second, Thank God the Patriots themselves still had tapes and notes to give to Goodell. I can't imagine the repercussions of the Patriots telling everyone they destroyed them. Again, puts the heat on Goodell, because the Patriots gave him what he asked for, and he took it upon himself to destroy them. Now seeing the earlier ones, I know why. Terrible quality, only fit for ESPN viewers.

Third, and again about Specter, if he is publicly admitting to hundreds of thousands of dollars from Comcast people, what is he getting under the table? And what is his bonus if he gets their way in the whole NFL broadcast thing? Now THAT would be a much bigger, and highly illegal, scandal than the Pats taping signals.

Regardless of the outcome, they're still 18-1...

That something is a violation of "the rules" or a violation of law is immaterial; in both instances, the outcome of the game may have been affected.

The fact is, Goodell has done all he can to smother this investigation. He was fully aware that the videotapes were created by the Patriots during their championship run, and that they would be the focal point of questions, and yet he destroyed them. This is unthinkable, in any business setting. And doing so, when the matter could have been easily resolved, is simply obtuse - unless, that is, the tapes revealed cheating on a larger scale.

And with respect to taping the Dolphins hand-signals, if this activity was so benign, why would the Patriots bother? Remember, this was back in 2001, when the Patriots and the Dolphins were much more even teams. The Patriots wouldn't have done it if they didn't believe there was some value to it.

But David is spot on - reporters have treated Goodell with kid gloves, and seem afraid to ask him the obvious, hard questions. A cloud will hang over the NFL until someone gets a backbone and starts asking pointed questions of him.

here is my thinking to this to hurt rich people you have to hurt their wallets and hurt their wallets seriously and this is where spector comes in now if he;s interested to clean this mess up what he needs to do is that do some serious research and come up with grounds that holds up in court now iam not saying he's a lawyer what i am saying is that he needs to come up with grounds to take some serious revenue from the NFL and unless he does that this is not coming out no matter what kind of pointed questions you ask Goodell simple as that because there is one thing this league NFL understands and that is money now take 75 to 80 billion from them without warning and let's see if their stands change as far as Spygateis concerned.

SHUT UP! YOU can't prove anything and neither could the rest of the league.

This whole thing has been an absolute JOKE. These games are on TV and EVERYBODY has a camera on them. Even if you have tapes of a coaches signals....if Eric Man-genius used the SAME signals for the next time they played the Patriots, he's a moron.

The "advantage" of the practice of video taping a teams coaches is minimum at best and thats based on teams not changing their signals just like they do in baseball.

Much-a-do about NOTHING.

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