Thoughts on Spygate

"Spygate". The word is incisive, sharp, simple, derivative, and inflammatory. Surely this business with the Patriots and their cameras matters, but cheating in sports is not a recent development. Steroids and spying, though admittedly bold and not very creative, are merely the latest developments in a long history of cheating in sports. Baseball in particular has a veritable highlight reel of cheating incidents from foreign substances and corked bats to signal stealing and field tampering. But football, too, has its own collection of closeted skeletons.

College football and cheating are inseperable. Every year one cheating scandal after another pokes its head into the national media spotlight for a moment and then quickly disappears forever. Just this past season (2007) an academic cheating scandal left half the Florida State roster ineligible for the team's bowl game. Boosters continue to pay college athletes under the table despite ever-increasing fines and eligibility penalties levied against their respective universities. Does MSU's death penalty ring a bell? How about Reggie Bush? Bush's case is proof positive that these issues can carry over to the professional ranks. Not that it needs to. Professional sports, unhindered by the restrictions and regulations of the NCAA, takes cheating to a far more sophisticated plateau.

On the basest level there's fighting. Fighting between teammates happens with such regularity that coaches have set policies for resolving pugilistic disputes before they boil over and affect relationships within the locker room. Jim Fassel had his players take off their pads, enter a ring formed of their teammates and fight it out. Naturally, then, one would expect fighting to be even more prevalent on the field between players of opposing teams. And so it is. What goes on in the pile is a flurry of strikes, pokes, and scratches that would make UFC fighters cringe. At the line of scrimmage it was once common to see spit accompanying the trash talk that flies between offense and defense, further inflaming the tension. An incident involving the infamous Bill Romanowski brought down the hammer of NFL law on spitting but thats one of the few things that does get policed on the football field. The players know how to live just inside the rules and as long as they don't get caught by the television cameras the league lets them do what they please down in the pile.

And on the sidelines coaches have lip readers and spies and signal-readers all looking for that extra competitive edge. The attitude is the same as it is in the pile: don't get caught and live just inside the rules. Is it any surprise that a team would step over the line and secure whatever advantages they could? Is it any surprise that the Patriots, the most successful franchise of the last decade and one of the most successful in the league's history, were the ones that did it? Do you really believe they were the only ones doing it? By some accounts, teams were well aware of the surveillance and were captured on those surveillance tapes waving to the cameramen.

The good news is that there is another tradition in sports that is as at least as old as cheating scandals themselves: self-policing. The NFL has taken a first round pick away from the Patriots, something they'll miss with the expiring contracts of Randy Moss, Asante Samuels, Randall Gay, and Junior Seau to name a few. They've also fined the team $250,000 and the coach, Bill Bellichick, $500,000, the largest such fines ever handed out by the NFL. These are severe penalties, and yet they are portrayed by most sports media outlets as a slap on the wrist. But the biggest result of these penalties and the attention the scandal has received in the press is the simple fact that, just like spitting at the line of scrimmage after the Romanowski incident, any and all video surveillance of opposing teams' practices will cease to occur in the NFL.

Arlen Spector didn't inquire into allegations of the grounds keeping crew at the Metrodome turning on the air conditioning during Twins games when opposing teams were up to bat, an attempt to physically affect the course of hit balls in play. Sure there wasn't a specific rule against such practices at the time but the fact remains that cheating created one of the best home field advantages sport has ever known and affected the outcome of at least one World Series. Whatever intelligence was gathered by the Patriots it can't change the trajectory of a thrown pass in the air. And what we don't know about the Spygate situation is just how much the opposing teams knew about the Patriots game plan from similarly illegal surveillance tactics. This is speculation and it means nothing in a court of law or in the mind of Senator Spector, but the real trial in this case is taking place in the court of public opinion. And in the court of public opinion speculation is everything. The fines will be payed and the games will go on and the self-policing system of professional sports will continue to motivate the evolution of the games, adaptation of play forced by the play itself. The irreversible consequences of it all will be felt by individuals, their reputations will be scathed and the scathing cannot be undone. Tom Brady's legacy as a quarterback will take on a tarnish for being associated with the scandal. Bill Bellichick, love him or loathe him, is a professional performing the duties assigned him to the best of his ability and has proven himself as capable as anyone who has ever undertaken the job. The ownership, coaches, and players of the NFL are committed to winning a game not by whatever means given to them but by whatever means they can get away with. That's a truth about sports thats not often invoked. Yes, it's a business but it is a game first. You can't turn a profit without wins and you can't be successful in professional sports with a losing franchise. Coaches and players cannot continue to receive paychecks without winning the games they play. That is what we ask of them.

And here is where one scandal informs another. Just as little will be accomplished by putting an asterisk next to the Patriots Super Bowl victories as will be accomplished by trapping steroids users into committing perjury by asking them to decide between a destroyed legacy or criminal charges. Throw Barry Bonds in jail and erase him from the record books. It won't change what happened. As far as I'm concerned Barry Bonds owns his records as rightfully as Ruth did. McGuire and Sosa should be enshrined in the Hall of Fame not for their numbers but for reinvigorating the game of baseball, rescuing it from the backlash of labor disputes, lockouts, and World Series cancellations. Enshrine them together as part of a great event in the historical landscape of American sports. (While you're at it put Pete Rose in with the Big Red Machine. Surely the new context puts his penalty squarely in the category of outweighing his crime.) As for Belichick and Spygate, let us approach the situation with the same civilized manner that Jim Fassel approached the fights that broke out amongst his players on the practice field. Fight it out on the field and don't let it infect the locker room. Keep the trial in the court of public opinion and out of the halls of Congress.