Deflategate is over so...back to Spygate!
Quote:
Now, the owner of the defending Super Bowl champions was publicly ripping the league. To anyone casually watching Deflategate, the civil war pitting Goodell against the Patriots and their star quarterback made no sense. Why were the league's premier franchise, led by a cherished team owner, and Brady, one of the NFL's greatest ambassadors, being smeared because a little air might have been let out of some footballs?
But league insiders knew that Deflategate didn't begin on the eve of the AFC Championship Game.
It began in 2007, with Spygate.
Interviews by ESPN The Magazine and Outside the Lines with more than 90 league officials, owners, team executives and coaches, current and former Patriots coaches, staffers and players, and reviews of previously undisclosed private notes from key meetings, show that Spygate is the centerpiece of a long, secret history between Goodell's NFL, which declined comment for this story, and Kraft's Patriots. The diametrically opposed way the inquiries were managed by Goodell -- and, more importantly, perceived by his bosses -- reveals much about how and why NFL punishment is often dispensed. The widespread perception that Goodell gave the Patriots a break on Spygate, followed by the NFL's stonewalling of a potential congressional investigation into the matter, shaped owners' expectations of what needed to be done by 345 Park Ave. on Deflategate.
It was, one owner says, time for "a makeup call."
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http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/...patriots-apart
It's a very long report, the but tl;dr version
- Goodell's job is actually safer now than it was before Deflategate, so the notion he's getting fired is absurd
- The Patriots videotaping of signals was over 5 years and about 40 games
- The taping allowed the Patriots to have diagrams of opponents signals before the games
- Allegations they straight up stole other teams play sheets