Spygate: the other non-scandal

We have two great alleged sports scandals now in America. One involves who injected what into someone's rear end a decade ago. The other matter so important it requires congressional attention involves who videotaped what over the past decade.

Here's the deal. You can videotape NFL football games. You can steal signs from the sidelines. You just can't mix the stealing with the video. Got that?

That, in essence, is what we are arguing in the so-called Spygate scandal involving the New England Patriots.

Here's Sunday's New York Times:

An N.F.L. team could place an army of lip readers on the sideline to try to steal messages from the opposing side. It could fill a row of seats behind the other team's bench with espionage experts to decipher all the sideline cues. It could have scouts in the press box aiming binoculars at every opposing coach, scribbling notes to match with game tape to glean what all the signals mean.

All that is allowed, and maybe some of it is done. But videotaping the other sideline? Do not think about it.

And therein lies one of the quirky twists to what may already be the biggest cheating scandal in the N.F.L.'s history, a chapter that began when the Patriots were caught taping the Jets' sideline last September.

The issue is not stealing signals. That is allowed, "and it is done quite widely," Commissioner Roger Goodell said recently.

The issue, rather, is the method of acquiring the signals.

Of course, there's an added twist to this story that involves the St. Louis Rams. At issue here is not videotaping of the sidelines, but rather the final pre-game walk through of the team the day before the Rams faced the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 36.

What did the Rams emphasize during that walkthrough? Kurt Warner told ESPN.com he remembers very little other than the offense running some red zone plays.

If the Patriots knew what the Rams were going to do inside the 20-yard line, New England coach Bill Belichick and company failed miserably.

The Rams penetrated the red zone twice -- both times in the fourth quarter. The Rams scored a touchdown on each drive.

Even if the allegations were true, "I don't think it had any effect on the game," former Rams coach Dick Vermeil said recently. "That stuff's been going on forever and I don't think you gain from it."

That's bad news for former Rams player Willie Gary, who filed a class-action lawsuit on Friday. In order to cash in, he's going to have to prove a cause-and-effect link.

"It is probably going to be difficult to win," University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the Times. "Maybe not impossible."

The other part of this story, rarely mentioned, is that the Rams were most likely monitoring the Patriots in the days before the game.

Here's what happened the Friday before that Super Bowl.

Halfway through practice, Patriots' linebackers coach Pepper Johnson noticed something in a third-floor window of a house next to the field.

Club and league officials said a telescope was clearly visible in the window, according to a pool report, and that 15 minutes later, a person appeared at the window, and then vanished.

Officials scanned the window with binoculars, but the person never returned.