Roger Goodell and NFL investigators did not press the issue at all. They accepted the eight tapes—only "portions" of which they actually watched—as everything the Pats had. They even deferred to the Patriots on the manner in which they would destroy the evidence against them! This is how Bill Belichick is able to stand at a podium and say "I misinterpreted a rule," or more recently, "you'll have to talk to Tom." He knows, perhaps better than anyone, that 345 Park Avenue has a hard on for protecting the Shield and as long as he isn't an outright hooligan, they will try to cover up these messes. He has built-in deniability.What happened next has never been made public: The league officials interviewed Belichick, Adams and Dee, says Glaser, the Patriots' club counsel. Once again, nobody asked how many games had been recorded or attempted to determine whether a game was ever swayed by the spying, sources say. The Patriots staffers insisted that the spying had a limited impact on games. Then the Patriots told the league officials they possessed eight tapes containing game footage along with a half-inch-thick stack of notes of signals and other scouting information belonging to Adams, Glaser says. The league officials watched portions of the tapes. Goodell was contacted, and he ordered the tapes and notes to be destroyed, but the Patriots didn't want any of it to leave the building, arguing that some of it was obtained legally and thus was proprietary. So in a stadium conference room, Pash and the other NFL executives stomped the videotapes into small pieces and fed Adams' notes into a shredder, Glaser says. She recalls picking up the shards of plastic from the smashed Beta tapes off the floor and throwing them away.
Martz thinks he got cheated! He thought he got cheated then, and he still thinks he got cheated now. Yet he did what he thought was best for the league. Imagine calling up a coach who lost the Super Bowl (and with it, his career) and asking him to take one more for the team. The NFL is cult-like with this all-for-one mentality, and only one team has it completely figured out: the Patriots.The other owners clearly see that the Patriots are out to get theirs, and do so in ways that preserve plausible deniability that it's on-the-level, and they've grown tired of it. It's probably out of jealousy, sure, but Goodell picked the worst "controversy" to finally go after the Pats. Here we had another Patriots Super Bowl with a cloud of impropriety hanging over it. But this time, rather than folding with a straight flush, Goodell went all in with a garbage hand. Everyone knew the Patriots were doing something with the balls, but two things worked against him. First, it was too insignificant. The balls were slightly deflated; great, who cares? Second, they had no definitive proof. Everything, from the texts to the ballboy's disappearance, stinks of wrongdoing, but the Patriots could, and did, explain it all away. they even allowed for deniability when Kraft eventually "accepted" Goodell's punishment. Hilariously, for the first time ever, the Patriots took one for the team.Belichick had guys obscuring the team logo on their shirts with tape, lying to stadium security about what they were doing, and was able to say "I misinterpreted a rule" with a straight face. According to the report, Patriots officials said the taping and decoding system helped primarily with "less sophisticated teams -- the Dolphins and Bills chief among them -- whose coaches didn't bother changing their signals."The Patriots and Belichick have preyed on the league like they do any other team of incompetents. They do what they want because no one is going to stop them, either because someone's asleep at the switch, or because it's better for the brand. Belichick doesn't care what the reason is, he just knows it works for him. That's his true genius."He told me, 'The league doesn't need this. We're asking you to come out with a couple lines exonerating us and saying we did our due diligence,'" says Martz, now 64 years old and out of coaching, during a July interview at his summer cabin in the Idaho mountains.
A congressional inquiry that would put league officials under oath had to be avoided, Martz recalls Goodell telling him. "If it ever got to an investigation, it would be terrible for the league," Goodell said.
Martz says he still had more questions, but he agreed that a congressional investigation "could kill the league." So in the end, Martz got in line.