It has been more than five years since the New England Patriots were caught videotaping their opponents’ signals, but there are plenty of people who are not ready to let it go. Marshall Faulk is one of those people, as the former St. Louis Rams running back feels he was personally affected by the spygate scandal.
On Tuesday, Faulk spoke with CSNNE.com’s Tom E. Curran and said he is never going to be over getting “cheated” out of a championship.
“Am I over the loss?” Faulk asked. “Yeah, I’m over the loss. But I’ll never be over being cheated out of the Super Bowl. That’s a different story. I can understand losing a Super Bowl, that’s fine … But how things happened and what took place. Obviously, the commissioner gets to handle things how he wants to handle them but if they wanted us to shut up about what happened, show us the tapes. Don’t burn ’em.”
Members of the media were shown the tapes before they were destroyed, and from what we hear they were exactly what you might think — the Patriots videotaping opposing coaches giving signals. The more Faulk ranted, the more it became clear that he still believes the Patriots taped the Rams’ walkthrough prior to the Super Bowl back in 2002.
“I understand Bill (Belichick) is a great coach,” Faulk said. “But No. 13 (Kurt Warner) will tell you. Mike Martz will tell you. We had some plays in the red zone that we hadn’t ran. I think we got to fourth down — we ran three plays that we hadn’t ran, that Mike drew up for that game — Bill’s a helluva coach … we hadn’t ran them the whole year (and the Patriots were ready for them).
“… It’s just little things like that. It’s either the best coaching in the world when you come up with situations that you had never seen before. Or you’d seen it and knew what to do.”
If you remember, it was John Tomase of the Boston Herald who reported the day before the Super Bowl back in 2008 that New England had videotaped St. Louis’ walkthrough. The problem is no proof of that tape ever existed, and Tomase and the Herald later apologized for running the story. Proof or no proof, it’s pretty clear that nothing is going to convince Faulk that the tape doesn’t exist. And in his defense, he’s not the only retired player who feels the Patriots didn’t deserve their Super Bowl victories.
