Before the start of the football season, Cary Williams, a veteran cornerback for the Philadelphia Eagles, reminded the sports world about a scandal the NFL would prefer people forget.
“One fact still remains: They haven’t won a Super Bowl since they got caught. They are cheaters,” Williams said in August.
He was referring to Spygate, when the New England Patriots were busted for illegally videotaping the Jets’ defensive signals during the first game of the 2007 season.
Then, as now with a series of disturbing incidents of domestic violence, the NFL seemed more interested in covering up the problem than investigating it.
“It really shows you what’s truly important to the NFL — and that’s ‘duck and cover,’ ” said Bryan O’Leary, author of the book “Spygate: The Untold Story.”
And that’s why certain allegations — including that the Pats were using a radio frequency outside the NFL’s purview to illegally communicate information to quarterback Tom Brady during the game — were seemingly ignored, O’Leary says.
The Jets play their arch rivals again this Thursday, and some fans are still fuming about the advantage the Patriots had over them — and that it was never fully probed.
“I just don’t understand it,” said lifelong Jets fan Ira Lieberfarb, 60. “They got caught cheating, and it should have been investigated in more detail. I find it very strange.”
It was seven years ago that Jets security confiscated a sideline camera and tape from a Patriots video assistant during their Sept. 9 game at the Meadowlands.
The spying was a blatant violation of league rules, since knowing what an opponent will do on any given play confers an immense advantage to a team.
As 49ers quarterback Steve Young once explained to ESPN: “The game would be over. If I knew what was coming, that’s the whole game.”
It was Jets head coach Eric Mangini, a former Pats defensive coordinator, who dropped a dime to NFL security about the sideline shenanigans of his former mentor, New England head coach Bill Belichick.
Mangini already had prepared an elaborate system to foil his former team.
“He had three sets of signals being given, one real, two dummy. He had the same thing going when he beat the Patriots” the previous year, a former Pats employee told Sports Illustrated.
But that meant extra work — that both teams were not playing on the same level field, the ex-staffer noted.
“I wasn’t going to give them the convenience of doing it in our stadium, and I wanted to shut it down,” Mangini said on “NFL Live,” adding that he later regretted doing it. “There was no intent to have the landslide that it has become.”
The filming was fairly straightforward — a staffer pointed a camera at an opposing team’s coaches from across the field. And it had gone on for nearly a decade — since Belichick took over the Pats in 2000, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell later revealed.
It was so obvious, the Pats were busted several times before Spygate erupted, including a year earlier, during a 35-0 thrashing of Green Bay.
The Packers spotted Pats video assistant Matt Estrella — who was also shooting the video during the Jets game the next season — shooting unauthorized video from the sidelines. He was asked to leave — then was spotted doing it from a tunnel, which got him booted from Lambeau Field.
“From what I can remember, he had quite a fit when we took him out,” Packers President Bob Harlan said.
When the Lions played the Pats in Foxboro in 2006, the same thing happened, Sports Illustrated reported.
“ ‘There’s a camera pointed right at our defensive coach making his calls. Is that allowed?’ a Lions’ employee asked in a call to the NFL booth. No, it certainly was not. So the videotaper was stopped. Then after a while he began again,” the magazine reported at the time.
But it wasn’t just a matter of filming opposing team’s coaches — it was also how that information was allegedly passed to Brady.
As the scandal broke, the NFL was investigating a possible violation into the number of radio frequencies the Patriots were using during the Jets game, sources told ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, who reported at the time that the Pats did not “have a satisfactory explanation when asked about possible irregularities in its communication setup during the game.”
Quarterbacks communicate with the sidelines via microphones in their helmets that pick up an NFL-monitored radio frequency. An NFL sideline official cuts off communications on this frequency 15 seconds before the play clock runs out.
O’Leary — who uses data crunched by a Las Vegas bookie and a Ph.D. statistician from China with no previous familiarity with Spygate — suggests Patriots “director of football research” Ernie Adams, a prep-school chum of Belichick from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., was the nerve center behind the chicanery.
Offensive plays would be called based on stolen signals and the information relayed straight to Brady’s helmet, O’Leary theorizes.
In this scenario, the extra frequency is critical, as it allows the team to do something in real time with the stolen signals, out of earshot of the NFL monitor, and change its plays accordingly.
If there’s an open channel during the play itself, you can also alert the quarterback to open receivers he may not see.
O’Leary repeats a rumor that Pats backup quarterback Doug Flutie once said he accidentally picked up Brady’s helmet during the 2005 season.
“He was amazed that the coaches kept right on speaking to Brady past the 15-second cutoff, right up until the snap,” according to O’Leary.
“The voice in Tom Brady’s helmet was explaining the exact defense he was about to face.”
That same year, Pats linebacker Ted Johnson told USA Today that an hour before game time, a list of the opposing team’s audibles — the signals a QB would use at the line of scrimmage just before a snap to change the play — would sometimes appear in his locker. He had no idea where the lists came from. Three years later, he said he was as surprised as anyone to hear about the cheating allegations.
Action from then-rookie Commissioner Goodell was suspiciously swift, critics said.
Less than a week after the tape was confiscated, Goodell on Sept. 13 issued an emergency order compelling the Pats to fork over any other tapes. Yet before receiving any of them, he handed down his punishment: taking away the Pats’ first-round draft pick the next year, while fining the team $250,000 and Belichick — who claimed he simply misinterpreted the rulebook and never used video to gain a competitive advantage — the league maximum $500,000.
On Sept. 20, the NFL announced the Pats handed over six tapes and two days later said little about what the recordings contained — only that they had been destroyed.
“When somebody has a hit that looks suspicious, it takes the league three to four days of looking at a tape, then they issue a fine,” O’Leary said.
“In this case, they had a team that potentially stole three Super Bowls, and they issued a verdict in four days. Does that sound like the NFL was trying to get to the bottom of anything?”
And the league’s actions didn’t sit well with some outside observers, including the Sen. Arlen Specter, who requested a meeting with Goodell in November 2008 to learn why the tapes had been destroyed.
What Specter learned from the one-hour, 40-minute sitdown in February 2008 was that the Pats had been spying on opposing teams for nearly a decade, ever since Belichick’s first year as head coach of the Pats.
“There was confirmation that there has been taping since 2000, when Coach Belichick took over,” said Specter, who called for an independent probe similar to a Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. It never materialized.
“I found a lot of questions unanswerable because the tapes and notes had been destroyed,” said the late Pennsylvania lawmaker. “We have a right to have honest football games.”
Despite rhetoric from the Beltway, the Patriots received no further sanctions — even after a long-delayed meeting in May 2008 between Goodell and Matt Walsh, an ex-Pats videographer who worked for the team from 2000 to 2002. Walsh came forward and eventually handed the league eight additional tapes, including evidence that the team was swiping in-game defensive and offensive signals against Miami, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and San Diego in 2000 and 2001.
Belichick assured the league the team never used information from the tapes during the same game and said he simply misinterpreted the league’s rule.
But critics such as O’Leary don’t buy it.
“If you tape a defensive coach’s signaling in the plays, and you compare it to the action of the field, you can quickly discover that when they flap their arms like a seagull, they’re in a blitz,” he said. “The basic formations are pretty easy to decipher with just a quarter of the action taped.”
Walsh did not return The Post’s call for comment, but
in 2008 he told “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” that the team’s intent was clear.
“Coach Belichick’s explanation for having misinterpreted the rules, to me, that really didn’t sound like taking responsibility for what we had done, especially considering the great lengths that we had gone through to hide what we were doing.”
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