The Pats were cheating back into Cowhers tenure… there were whispers back into 01 about it.. its also easy to pick out when they were able to and when they weren’t…
One of the analytical stat media groups,in the mid 00’s, before spygate, pro football outsiders, i think, did a huge breakdown of a bunch of great head coach’s ability to get their team in the correct general playcall… so for instance calling a max protect or screen play against a blitz or flooding a zone or vice versa on D.
Billy B had this stretch where he was way above the greats numbers… he just always had the right play in especially later in games. Everyone is at like 50%ish.. he was at like way over 75%ish or 80% or something ridiculous…
After the accusations they revisited it for the period of tge first half after the league made adjustments
( oh yeah, among the nfls responses to the first spygate, they gave teams tge ability to mike one defensive player like a qb, and in a move that few paid attention to, added encryption to the qb mike system… they would redo the encryption a couple more times after various pats scandals too…)
And suddenly after those moves the ability of his team to be in the right formations dropped back down to what you’d expect from a good coach, only to go back up the next season…..
They taped practices
They taped signals
Peyton manning and tony dungy thought they bugged the locker room
Read the espn report on that era… they stole playbooks
They were accused of screwing with the audio system, outright stealing playcalls off the audio system
Miking up multiple players with radios that didn’t cut off at all rather than with15 seconds on the playclock….
Remember the insiders said that the harsh punishment for brady over deflategate was because the owners were forcing it on goodell because he let the pats off too lightly from spygate and they felt that theykept doing many of the things the league told them not to… also the league mysteriously had to move to more and more harsher encryption of the sideline audio signals and overhauling that stuff is really expensive… they didn’t keep doing it for no reason
Its like I said before… enough nflrs talk about it in their friend circles that its only a matter of time that the stuff not talked about in the espn expose comes out eventually….
And yes, the league destroyed evidence… the tapes, tge audio equipment ( which, when directly asked about it in the first couple press conferences, Goodell claimed was sent out to “experts” to evaluate what it did, then utterly blew off any info about it once it was out of sight, out of mind)