Posted on 03/09/2008 7:17:48 PM PDT by BGHater
Matt Walsh, the former New England Patriots employee said to have tapes of illegal spying by the team, is close to an agreement to turn over information to the NFL.
The NFL said in a statement Sunday night that in the last week, lawyers for Walsh and the league have made "substantial progress toward an agreement that will allow Mr. Walsh to be interviewed."
"Both sides are optimistic that any remaining issues can be addressed successfully and they are committed to reaching a full agreement as promptly as possible," the statement added.
Walsh, a golf pro in Hawaii, has been seeking protection from lawsuits and other legal action, whether by the Patriots or other parties. The two sides have been negotiating for almost a month after reports surfaced just before the Super Bowl that Walsh videotaped a walkthrough practice of the St. Louis Rams before the 2002 title game. It was won by the Patriots 20-17 over the Rams, who were favored by more than two touchdowns.
Walsh's lawyer, Michael N. Levy of the Washington firm of McKee Nelson, confirmed Sunday night that an agreement was near.
"I have consistently asked the NFL to provide appropriate legal protections for Mr. Walsh," Levy said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
"In recent discussions I have had with the league's lawyer, we have made substantial progress toward this end, and I am hopeful that we will be able to craft an agreement with the necessary legal protections so Mr. Walsh can come forward with the truth."
(Excerpt) Read more at nmsn.foxsports.com ...
Tehehe.*
MM (in TX)
willing to bet that they taped the Eagle’s before they played them.
If evidence is turned over to the NFL, what’s to keep the Commish from destroying it et again?
Has this guy ever said how this alleged taping of the Rams walk-through was done? You would think some dude in the empty stands sporting a video camera would have attracted some attention. Does he claim to have been hiding in a press box or suite or something?
Did someone say Eagles?
Perhaps last SuperBowl was the first honest one for the Patriots.
Goodell and Belichick BOTH should be fired and banned from the league. The cheater and the enabler are both corrupt as hell IMO.
I think you are correct. Without a substantial advantage that their opponents do not have, they are an 8 and 8 team at best. The genius coach turns out to be a fraud and a cheat.
He was also fired from the team when another employee ratted him out for audio taping conversations with Pioli.
He's got a very high powered lawyer representing him even though he doesn't make much money which is very strange.
The NFL investigated the taping prior to the Rams game and found that it would not have been possible for it to have happened.
Walsh has a history of making stuff up including serious resume embellishment.
Dismissed from his golf team for planting a knife in his bed as a booby trap to punish his roomie and roomie’s GF from sitting on his bed.
The Pats have been very open about taping (as has Jimmy Johnson who told all on a radio interview recently). They were pretty arrogant about the whole thing but this just seems to bring out the paranoid conspiracy theories in people. The Pats brazenly taped teams and that's cheating and the SBs are tainted but when Jimmy Johnson talks about all the stuff he did as a coach no one cares.
Maybe it's because Jimmy is a likable guy and BB isn't?
And in hearing people who know far more than you ever will the taping of signals (which incidentally other teams have admitted to doing like the Dallas Cowboys in the 90s) say that it doesn't offer much of an advantage with all of the changing up and decoying that they do.
But let's not let intelligence get in the way....
This has to do with the Patriots, but it's much bigger than the Patriots. The NFL does NOT want people looking into their business practices. Belichick scares the h#ll out of the NFL because he's a nut. Other teams have accused him of jamming their headsets during games. His people have been thrown out of other stadiums doing the same kind of taping. He's listed Brady on the weekly injury report for four straight seasons. He's required to wear NFL licensed apparel, so he cuts the sleeves off a hoodie. Tons of the things he does are little "up yours" gestures to the league and it's rules.
This, IMHO, is what scares the cr@p out of the NFL. It's why they only did a cursory investigation and why they destroyed the evidence. They don't know what they'll turn up if they really investigate Belichick, and if video of the Rams red zone offense shows up on the tapes the guy turns over, the NFL has a multi-billion dollar problem. The NFL operates under an incredible amount of secrecy. They won't allow a team to be a publicly held corporation (the Packers were incorporated before the rule change) because public corporations have to have financial transparency. The news entities that cover the NFL are primarily advertising venues for the league. All the major news networks have multi-billion dollar contracts with the NFL, and they don't want to have their prize broadcast tarnished.
The NFL uses the anti-trust exemptions to leverage cities against one another by keeping the number of teams small enough for there always to be a place for a team to jump to, but high enough to keep another league from being profitable. They've tried to strong arm the major cable companies. This is what got Specter involved, in my opinion. Specter has gotten contributions from Grande, and they have his ear.
Most stadiums are built primarily with tax dollars. Frequently, cities simply give the luxury boxes to the team owners and the stadium prices have skyrocketed. When Texas Stadium was built in 1971, it cost $35 million. The new Cowboys stadium will cost over $1 billion dollars. How many other buildings are retired after 38 years, as Texas Stadium will be? Other teams similarly dip into the public trough. The Saints have received nearly $200 million to stay in Louisiana.
The Patriots are a headache, but what the league really fears is an investigation of it's entire way of doing business. It will take some major league political contributions to keep this under wraps at this point, and probably some political concessions, like laying off Time-Warner and Grande.
So, what happens if it turns out the Patriots DID tape the Rams red zone offense prior to the Super Bowl? Well, there are some legitimate questions. If this cheating was going on and the NFL doesn't know about it or covered it up, what about games getting fixed? Would Michael Vick have thrown a game? If the NFL didn't know about the Pats or Vick running the dog fighting, what else don't they know? If they knew and covered it up, what else are they covering up?
The early season hand slap the league gave the Patriots was a poor attempt to get this off the front page. Goodell is a born and bred NFL guy. He's been in the league since he was 23. He believes that the crime isn't the crime; people outside the NFL finding out about the crime is the crime. As Forrest Gump said, this investigation could turn out to be like a box of chocolates. Once emails and other documents get subpoenaed, you don't know what you're going to get, and this is what the NFL fears. They don't want investigators looking at their business practices.
I believe you are correct. Considering the beating they took from a wildcard team, it's pretty clear (at least to me) that the Patriots were simply incapable of winning a game without some sort of unethical advantage.
“The genius coach turns out to be a fraud and a cheat.”
Maybe he could be Hillary’s running mate.
So - when do the Congressional hearings begin....???
/sarcasm
All through the 2007 season Spygate dogged the Patriots. It wouldn’t go away. Patriots fans chalked it up to jealous fans of other teams resenting the pursuit of perfection by the Pats, but it went beyond that. Logically, it shouldn’t have gone beyond the examination and punishment by the league office, but no matter how much the league, the Patriots and their fans insisted it was over and done, it kept popping back up. I tried to figure out why. Cheating has always been part of the NFL. Roger Staubach talked about Fran Tarkenton trying to kick a ball forward while talking to an official while they were waiting for a measurement. The Raiders laughed about the “Holy Roller” play that won them a game against the Chargers. The NFL history is littered with stories of stolen playbooks and microphones hidden in locker rooms. So, why were the Patriots different? There are three reasons the charge wouldn’t die.
The first reason is obvious: New England was pursuing perfection. People could deal with a New England championship. The perfect season, though, was one for the ages. It’s the holy grail of the NFL. Fans resented the possibility that it was tainted.
Barry Bonds has already felt the sting of this kind of backlash. Anyone looking at major league ball clubs knows that steroids are everywhere. Bonds became the center of the controversy, though, because he was pursuing the holy grail of baseball: the all-time home run record, possibly the most prestigious record in sports. When you’re going for one for the angels, you’d better be pure.
The second, and less obvious reason is the game has changed, and the culprit is instant replay. Before instant replay football was a game that was settled on the field. It’s not anymore. Whether a call was great or horrible, it was the call and the game moved on. Fans might gnash their teeth and talk about “ifs” and “buts”, but the play was over and it was settled. You moved on to the next play and when the game was over, it was over.
Now, everything is second-guessed. The immediacy of the game is gone. When you see a touchdown, pass reception or fumble, you don’t know whether what you’ve seen is real until you look around for the red flag and wait through a commercial. In a Browns-Ravens game this year, the officials reviewed a field goal attempt (illegally) after the game was over and pulled teams out of the locker rooms to start playing again. Players now have to wait until Wednesday or Thursday to find out if they committed a foul last week. The penalty doesn’t affect the game result, but fines are common. Fans have traded the immediacy and fun of the game for a promise that any errors will be corrected.
Finally, Belichick is still in the game. If he had quit, it would probably have died down. However, he didn’t. When Jimmy Johnson admitted to doing the same kind of taping in the 90s he was already out of football. What was the league going to do to him? If he had admitted this while the team was still together and they were still competing for Super Bowls, you bet there would have been a call for investigations and other sanctions.
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