Sometimes it’s hard to know if the Patriots are winning because they are spying on all their opponents, or if the Patriots are making their opponents waste all their time thinking they are being spied upon.
On Sunday, the NFL reportedly had the Jets locker room swept for bugs at New England’s Gillette Stadium before New York’s game against the Patriots. What is not clear is why this happened or who requested it. ProFootballTalk says the league had the room searched. An NFL spokesman told the site that the Jets didn’t ask for the search. But if the Jets didn’t ask for the search, who did? And why did it happen? And how many more times is this going to happen? Because it’s becoming clear that everyone in the NFL is certain that Patriots coach Bill Belichick must be doing something.
And in a lot of ways that’s worse than anything the Patriots might be doing. After months of the scandal called Deflategate, and the endless debate over whether team employees slightly deflated footballs in a Gillette Stadium bathroom before January’s AFC championship game, there came a flood of stories about the Patriots spying. Opposing coaches and team executives told of bugged locker rooms, stolen game plans and secret taping of practices. Some talked of creating bogus play scripts and running fake plays in walkthroughs just in case the Patriots were there to steal the list or film the practice.
Some of those same stories said that whatever information New England might have seized was borderline useless. When codes were cracked and signals deciphered, they turned out to only work a small percentage of the time. A few players questioned the reliability of the intelligence.
But the very fact teams knew or fretted the Patriots were doing something is likely more dangerous to them than the actual act of stealing secrets. NFL coaches demand routine. They draw schedules for every day of the year, controlling everything from the time players meet the trainers to what is served for lunch. They hate deviations from that schedule. Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into time blocks is a distraction. To football coaches, distractions are the worst.
Preparing against another team’s espionage is a distraction. Taking time to draw fake plays is a distraction. Scanning a locker room for bugs is a distraction. Any time spent on something that doesn’t have to do with a that week’s game is time wasted. Nobody probably makes more NFL coaches waste their time than the Patriots.
Instead of preparing for Tom Brady who might be the best quarterback the game has ever seen, coaches prepare for ghosts. They guard against invisible spies and equipment room flunkies carrying hiding inflation gauges in the pockets of their team sweatpants. Any equipment glitch is a sign that Patriots are up to old tricks. The ensuing fight is energy burned.
Every team that goes into Foxborough is affected. The subject of simply going into Gillette Stadium becomes a conversation topic in the days before the game. Reporters ask coaches and players if they fear the Patriots are going to doing something untoward. Anything unusual becomes something suspicious. Then comes the anxiety: is it happening to us?
During the first half of this season’s opening game at Gillette, the Pittsburgh Steelers complained that their communications equipment had stopped working. They flew into a rage. The Patriots were definitely up to something, they shouted. It didn’t matter that the league later said the problem was not the Patriots’ doing, and that such communications issues happen all the time in stadiums all over the NFL. The fact it happened in New England ate at the Steelers all game. The fact they screamed so loud about it after the game says it was on their mind the entire night. Even if the effort spent agonizing over the headset malfunction was a small percentage of their evening, it was that much less effort focused on football.
Sometimes the idea of Bill Belichick is more dangerous than what Bill Belichick might actually be doing.
The NFL is silent on why it apparently swept the Jets locker room. The league told Pro Football Talk that it examines locker rooms from time to time for reasons it won’t disclose. The idea of bugs in a locker room is hardly new. A former Cleveland Browns player once said the team’s legendary coach Paul Brown was so convinced that Chicago Bears coach George Halas was bugging the visitors’ locker room through the lights that he would shout at the light fixtures before addressing his team.
Supposedly nothing was found in the Jets locker room on Sunday. But Belichick didn’t need secret microphones to disrupt the Jets. All it took was the thought they might be there.
