Explore More
The latest Patriots rule-breaking scandal fails to live up to their previous billings.
New England was docked two days of OTA practices by the NFL this week for offseason violations that were previously unspecified.
Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio first reported on Thursday that the NFL Players Association accused the Patriots of a “meeting violation.”
Boston Sports Journal then reported that former Giants coach Joe Judge, whom the Patriots list as an offensive assistant but is described in documents obtained by BSJ as their special teams coach, held special teams meetings that caused some offensive and defensive players to be at the team’s practice facility longer than allowed.
Players are only allowed at the facility for a maximum of four hours for OTAs.
The NFLPA complained about the violation in a May 4 filing, per Boston Sports Journal, which reported Bill Belichick was also fined $50,000 as a result of the infraction.
This situation obviously pales in comparison to the Spygate scandal in 2007, when the Patriots were busted illegally recording hand signals from the Jets sidelines.
Deflategate is a little more dubious.
Tom Brady was accused of concocting a scheme to have deflated footballs for the 2014-15 AFC championship game against the Colts, which the Patriots won in a landslide, 45-7.
NFL investigator Ted Wells concluded that it was “more probable than not” that Brady was aware of the deflated footballs.
The investigation went so far as to uncover a text message in which clubhouse attendant James McNally, the man responsible for handling footballs before games, referred to himself as “The Deflator.”
As a result, the NFL suspended Brady for the first four games of the 2015 season, and an endless series of appeals pushed the punishment to the opening four weeks of 2016.
In the meantime, various questions such as whether the NFL properly accounted for the Ideal Gas Law muddied the waters and it became unclear if Brady was a sinister genius, a victim of one of the greatest conspiracies in modern sports history, or perhaps somewhere in between.
ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlf3R7j25ma21frLW6edOhnGaokam%2FqrvTrGSgp6Rivba6yKyfnpxdl8ZuwMeeZKeenGQ%3D