« Get this week's fishing report early | Main | PawSox beat Bulls at McCoy »

May 8, 2008

1,000 Pittsburghers agree: Belichick should be suspended

According to the story broken last night by The New York Times, former Patriots assistant Matt Walsh today will deliver his video collection to the NFL. The story goes on to identify the teams whose coaches will be featured giving signals on the tapes, and notes that Walsh does not in fact have a tape of the St. Louis Rams' 2002 Super Bowl walkthrough.

The team that probably has the biggest potential beef here is the Pittsburgh Steelers, who were upset by the Patriots in the 2002 AFC Championship Game. According to The Times, the tape Walsh has has been edited to show Steelers coaches signalling plays during the game, followed by two different camera angles of the actual plays that were called.

So far, Pittsburgh seems to be the city where this story is being taken most seriously. It was the lead item on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Web site all day today, and according to the results of an online Post-Gazette poll, a majority of Post-Gazette readers want to see Bill Belichick suspended (of course, the choices in the poll didn't really represent a balanced set of viewpoints). Ninety-three percent of people responding to a poll in the Post-Gazette say the Patriots deserve additional penalties for their conduct.

By contrast, most people responding to our poll on projo.com say the Walsh tapes are just more of the same. So I guess it just depends on what side of the fence you happen to stand.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is not really playing up the story, but some Rams fans posting on this discussion thread are sure that conspiracies are being covered up by the NFL.

On the Web site of the San Diego Union-Tribune the story also received scant attention, but football writer Jerry Magee does have a column that calls the Patriots the team to beat in 2008 in the AFC, with the Chargers second.

Posted by Mike McDermott  at 2:33 PM to Patriots | Permalink

Comments

Post a comment

Please be civil. Vicious comments, personal attacks and profanity won't be published.

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)