New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick distanced himself from the video recording that took place in the press box during the Browns-Bengals game in Cleveland in Week 14.
The Patriots coach made his weekly appearance on WEEI’s “Ordway, Merloni and Fauria,” and addressed the NFL’s investigation into whether New England’s video team recorded the Bengals sideline in Week 14. Cincinnati believes a Patriots scout was using a video camera in the press box to record the Bengals’ coaches and players during the first quarter, according to ESPN’s Dianna Russini.
Belichick said the Patriots were “absolutely not” recording the Bengals’ signals. He said a video team was recording for a documentary, released on Patriots.com, which profiles the team’s scouting department.
“From a football standpoint, we absolutely know what the rules are, and we are in 100 percent compliance with, to the best of my knowledge, of every single rule that we’re responsible for.” Belichick told WEEI on Monday.
The video team was in the building to record a piece on the scout and his day-to-day work — and nothing else.
“As I understand it, they were taping him — trying to show kind of what an advanced scout does,” Belichick said. “A scout can’t film the opponents as an advanced scout. Our video people are not even allowed to point the camera at the opponents in pregame warmups or their side of the field or anything else to test out their equipment. They 100 percent know — all of our scouts and all of our video people — what that is. Again, I have nothing to do with TV production shows.”
Belichick made a distinction clear: there’s the Patriots video crew and there’s the Patriots.com video crew. The Patriots.com and Kraft Media Group employees, apparently, work separate from the team’s video crew. And it appears the Kraft Media Group employees are not directly overseen by the Patriots. Belichick said he had no prior knowledge of what they were trying to record.
“Evidently, this is our production people on the TV show that were there,” Belichick said. “I have nothing to do with — we have absolutely nothing to do with anything they shoot or direct. I’ve never even seen their tapes. This is something that we 100 percent have zero involvement with. This is something you’d have to talk to the production team about. We’ve never seen anything that they’ve shot other than what’s been on TV.”
