“The Patriots haven’t won anything since Spygate.”
That was (once) a popular refrain around NFL media circles when looking for an easy crutch to knock down a franchise on an unprecedented run of success over the last decade-and-a-half.
Of course, the Patriots had won more games than any other team in the league, including seven division titles and three AFC championships since they were caught videotaping the Jets’ defensive signals from an illegal location in September of 2007, but why let facts get in the way of a good sound byte?
Falling just short of another Super Bowl title from 2007-2013 kept the door open for the #HotTakez pundits to say their success was somehow dependent stealing signals.
The elusive fourth Super Bowl title was supposed to be the one that silenced those still banging the Spygate drum so many years later.
It was supposed to be the one that cemented the legacy of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, and perhaps Patriots fans naively hoped it would win some good will back from general NFL fans.
After another title, even the two Super Bowl losses would look like more like feathers in the cap than examples of a team that couldn’t win without cheating.
The legacies of Brady and Belichick would be cemented with their fourth Lombardi Trophy together, but it was not a win of redemption, it was one inescapably as the villain.
The Patriots have gone from a team that an entire nation felt connected to after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to one of the most hated franchises in sports.
When the Patriots came out of the locker room announced as a team in Super Bowl 36, no one thought about how much they hated Bill Belichick or Tom Brady. That they were cheaters.
No, this wasn’t a dynasty. It was an upstart team of underdogs led by a bunch of castoffs, including their head coach, and a second-year quarterback who was drafted 199th overall the year prior.
The Patriots’ failure to hang on for the win in Super Bowl 42 only empowered the Spygate crowd.
Yes, the Patriots had been busted and punished in September and had gone 18-0 while not taping opponents’ signals from an illegal location, but one miracle catch by David Tyree and the causation between taping opponents signals and winning Super Bowls was cemented in the minds of anyone looking to discredit the Patriots’ success.
By the time the Patriots took the field for Super Bowl 46, ten years after their first Super Bow victory, few outside their fan base were pulling for the them to win. And when Eli Manning put together another last-minute Lombardi-winning drive, the “they haven’t won anything since Spygate” crew were smiling.
In 2014, with their best defense in a decade, the Patriots once again were the top seed in the AFC, but both games en route to the Super Bowl would be filled with controversies.
The use of deception with ineligible receivers was nothing new to the NFL, but when executed by the Patriots in a playoff game, they cheated!
With Deflategate, the Patriots were once again in the national spotlight for the wrong reasons. Even today, no one argues that any deflation of footballs before the first half of the AFC Championship had any impact on the game, but the implication of secretive operations to circumvent the PSI rules was more than enough for the torches to be lit, once again calling for asterisks and sanctions.
Then, months later, comes the Wells Report, itself igniting another powder keg of controversy as Patriots fans dug in, with plenty of ammo from the Washington Post, New York Times, and even Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk.com.
Super Bowl 49 was a crowning moment for Tom Brady, but it wasn’t quite the universal coronation many Pats fans might’ve hoped for.
Brady, facing unprecedented controversy with his integrity being called into question, put together one of the greatest games of his life against one of the best defenses he had ever played against.
Brady went 13-of-15 for 124 yards and two TDs in the fourth quarter against the vaunted Seattle defense. There was no taping of signals. The balls were all legally inflated. Neither mattered, just like they never mattered.
What we were left with was a legendary performance that no one can disregard or discredit, and Brady did it under the harshest off-field circumstances of his career.
Spygate was about Belichick, but Deflategate was about Brady, and when the confetti fell on him in Arizona, Brady was far removed from the charismatic backup who defeated the Rams 14 years earlier.
The Patriots fell just short of another Super Bowl numerous times after September 2007, allowing Spygate to be held over their head for eight long seasons. They were under the dark cloud of Deflategate for just two weeks.
But the both were erased in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl 49 in Glendale and the haters can never say Brady and the Pats haven’t won anything since Spygate… or Deflategate.
