In the days leading to his team?s showdown with New England, Jets Coach Rex Ryan went out of his way to praise Bill Belichick, the Patriots? dour coach.Ryan called Belichick the best in the business and a respected opponent.?I think he?s the No. 1 coach in this league,? Ryan said. ?That?s undisputable. He?s smart. He gets his team going every year. He?s a great evaluator of talent. I do admire him, as a son of a coach. Do I want to be like him? No, I want to be like myself, but I want to have the success that he?s had through the years.?Normally unrestrained in heaping praise on his team, Ryan was careful with his remarks about Belichick and the Patriots. It was as if he wanted to play down the perception that a shift in power was taking place.Too late. The shift has occurred: the Jets are in ascendancy and New England is in retrograde, although it has nothing to do with one game, one season, injuries or upheaval.The shift was set in motion three seasons ago by a moral misstep by Belichick. The Patriots? empire began to unravel the day New England was caught cheating.After the season-opening game between the Jets and the Patriots in September 2007, Eric Mangini, the Jets? coach at the time, reported New England to the N.F.L. for videotaping the Jets? defensive signals. The Jets confiscated the tape and turned it over to the N.F.L.The scandal, which came to be called Spygate, put New England and Belichick under a cloud, although by 2007, several teams had begun to suspect the Patriots were taping opposing coaches.The Green Bay Packers caught New England in the act in 2006 but never took the complaint further. Belichick was thought to be taping opponents when Mangini was a member of the Patriots? defensive staff under Belichick from 2000 to 2005.The N.F.L. fined Belichick $500,000 and the team $250,000 and took away a first-round pick in the 2008 draft.But the Patriots and Belichick lost more than money. New England lost some of its luster as a first-class organization. No one doubts Belichick?s coaching genius, but he lost a measure of respect for violating the sanctity of sportsmanship and the integrity of competition.?Belichick also sent a troubling message to his prot�g�s.One of them, Mangini, reacted by turning in his old boss. But another, Josh McDaniels, was caught in the ambition trap ? perhaps as Belichick was.And last night, McDaniels was fired as the Denver Broncos? coach less than two weeks after the N.F.L. fined him $50,000 and the franchise another $50,000 when it learned the team?s director of video operations had recorded six minutes of the San Francisco 49ers? walk-through the day before the teams met on Oct. 31 in London.The employee was Steve Scarnecchia, identified by the N.F.L. as one of those who made improper videotapes while employed by the Patriots. McDaniels was a member of Belichick?s staff during the Super Bowl years; so was Scarnecchia.Why would McDaniels hire Scarnecchia? Did he do it out of loyalty, or because he felt he needed the sort of edge that Scarnecchia could provide?McDaniels said he never watched the tape, and the N.F.L. said it believed him. McDaniels was fined because he did not immediately report Scarnecchia to Broncos executives.Why were the Patriots fined $750,000 in 2007 and stripped of a draft pick and Denver only $50,000?In explaining the differences in penalties in a recent conference call, the N.F.L.?s general counsel, Jeff Pash, offered a chilling indictment of the Patriots. He said the league thought the Denver episode was isolated and perpetrated by a single person who did not receive direction from a superior.?You have a single incident as opposed to years of activity,? Pash said.Years of activity.On the other hand, New England has not won a championship since the Jets turned Belichick in for cheating. Is this a coincidence? Or in a league in which winning and losing hang by such a slender thread, can the loss of a camera be the difference? The Patriots lost the Super Bowl to the Giants by a narrow margin, just as they had won their three Super Bowls by a combined 9 points.The unanswered question is what level of conceit or insecurity prompted Belichick to cheat. We may know that only if Belichick writes the ultimate autobiography. Meanwhile, we continue to refer to Belichick as a genius and one of the great coaches in N.F.L. history.New England will not be defined by the spying fiasco. The Patriots don?t need to win another championship to validate themselves, nor does Belichick. He has three Super Bowl rings as validation.But Spygate left a stain that will not be washed away by victories and even championships.
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