Steve Silverman

Steal an opponent’s signals in Major League Baseball and chances are you will be celebrated as a grizzled veteran with a keen eye and great knowledge of the game.

Steal signals in football and you find yourself out $500,000 and a first-round pick if the Pats make the playoffs (2^nd and 3^rd rounders if they don’t). Bill Belichick used a camera to get those signals, which means he has gone beyond what a baseball veteran like Don Zimmer used to do.

Perhaps Belichick's biggest crime was being so direct in having the camera on the Jets' sideline do the spying. Had another camera from a different location focused on the Jets' sideline and coaching staff, Belichick would have been in the clear. That’s the way many other teams in the league do it and have for years.

Much as Barry Bonds has drawn an extra dose of wrath because he has a boorish and despicable personality, Belichick is being taken to task because he refuses to give great sound bites. Belichick chooses not to play the public relations game. Not because he can’t come up with a quip or a one-liner, but because he chooses to stick with his main job of coaching a football team to the best of his ability.

He does not look to put himself in the national spotlight and do commercials that would line his pockets with additional cash. He chooses to concentrate on his football team.

Even Belichick’s greatest detractors admire his single-minded nature when it comes to preparing his team. Yes, he will study an opponent to find a weakness that his players can exploit, but he also knows his own team’s strengths and plays to them just as much as he does to an opponent's perceived weakness.

Belichick is to coaching what the San Diego Padres’ Greg Maddux is to pitching. Neither one talks very much about what he does or how he goes about his job, but if you watch carefully it’s easy to figure. Maddux is a sure-fire Hall of Famer because he has been able to make hitters swing at balls and take strikes. He has never an overpowering fastball or an amazing strikeout total, but he knows his strengths and his opponent’s weaknesses.

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Belichick is the same way. He’s got an ace in Tom Brady, a running back on the rise in Laurence Maroney and a potential gamebreaker in Randy Moss. But more than his skill-position players, the Pats have a consistent offensive line and a defense that rises to the occasion. Belichick gets the best out of his talented team and then exploits his opponents’ vulnerabilities.

Consider this decision by commissioner Roger Goodell to be the height of naiveté. Does he really think that Belichick is the only one doing this? The league was reportedly tipped by former Belichick protégé Eric Mangini and then hit the mother lode by seizing a camera that had tape of a Jets coach signaling in plays.

Plausible deniability was no longer a possibility. Goodell had him dead to rights and imposed his sanctions.

Belichick did not invent signal-stealing, yet he is paying for this supposed crime in a way that nobody has ever done before. There is a fairness issue that should have been considered before doling out the fine and taking away the draft pick or picks. Perhaps Goodell wanted to show he wasn’t just about punishing players who violate the law. Maybe he was thinking he could ingratiate himself with the players by punishing one of the league's best and most powerful coaches.

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But what he has done is single Belichick out for embarrassment. If the Pats had been more surreptitious and less bold in their camera angles, it would never have been brought to the league’s attention.

Belichick is like the bank robber who tries to commit his crime in broad daylight. If he had waited until nightfall, nobody would have been the wiser. But because he did it directly and to a former underling who knew his methods, Belichick is paying a big price.

That probably won’t stop his team from playing its best football this season, but his reputation has been tarnished. Now he's been branded a cheater in a league where winning is the only thing that matters.

Yet Belichick is better at winning than anyone else and he makes no attempt to appease anyone. That’s why he has been singled out to pay a price.

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