Bob Cook

It’s taken only three days for the Richard Nixon-Bill Belichick comparison to become hackneyed, but the paranoid Patriots coach is making it so easy. Especially because Belichick’s version of a third-rate burglary is threatening to become the presumably insignificant event that kicks off a slow, painful process that ends with the knockout of a proud, arrogant and powerful man.

Just because Roger Goodell punished Belichick and the Patriots for violating NFL rules by sending a video assistant to tape New York Jets’ coaches sending in defensive signals does not mean that the scandal dubbed Videogate (there’s that Nixon parallel again) is over. Far from it.

Not with numerous players and teams now declaring, or just wondering, what Belichick might have pulled on them in games past, like how some Philadelphia Eagles are re-examining how, in Super Bowl XXXIX, the Patriots seemed to have the uncanny ability to throw a screen pass every time the Eagles’ defense blitzed. Not with claims of Belichick’s videotape system going back as far as his early 1990s tenure as Cleveland’s head coach.

Not with a Detroit Lions source telling SI.com that the headsets connecting the sidelines to the coaches’ sky box had a funny way of shorting out at Gillette Stadium whenever the Lions appeared to be close to scoring, and not with Lions general manager Matt Millen telling the same site that another team’s coach told him the same thing happened to his team at the Patriots’ field.

Not with Belichick using weasel words in his prepared response regarding Goodell’s punishment—a $250,000 for the Patriots, a $500,000 fine for Belichick (the maximum allowed under NFL bylaws) and the loss of a first-round draft pick next year, or a second- and a third-round pick if the Patriots don’t make the playoffs. Emphasis on the weasel words is mine: “We have never used sideline video to obtain a competitive advantage while the game was in progress,” according to the statement attributed to Belichick. “Part of my job as head coach is to ensure that our football operations are conducted in compliance of the league rules and all accepted interpretations.”

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No, it’s not over, not with Belichick still able to tap any of the team dossiers whose information was augmented by previous cheating—the cheating doesn’t have to occur “while the game was in progress” for it to be beneficial. Not with Belichick still holding onto the canard that he didn’t break a rule, he merely misinterpreted it.

And definitely not with fans, players, coaches, journalists, league officials and anyone else who is not a hard-core New England Patriots backer or employee digging into the past, looking cross-eyed at the present, and otherwise trying to answer the question that Belichick has unintentionally put forth — is he a coaching genius worthy of the Hall of Fame, or is he worthy of being declared a pumped-up, Mark McGwire-like fraud who will have to slink away in shame, still vowing to not talk about the past?

Most definitely, that is an offensive question to the Patriots and their fans. Back to Nixon, it’s reminiscent of how the president’s supporters initially declared the Watergate break-in to be a third-rate burglary, and that the media in particular was trumping up something that was really no big deal. And then as more evidence accrued that Nixon OK’d illegal conduct that went far beyond rifling through papers at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, they declared that everybody does what Nixon did, but that he just got caught. And that turncoats like John Dean (the Eric Mangini of his generation) were wrong themselves to turn against Nixon.

Belichick and his team might rather want to talk about Sunday’s game against San Diego, but all those people who felt wronged by Belichick are coming out of the woodwork as his ship starts sinking. Rats, some might call them.

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That Belichick has made enemies and remained aloof from his colleagues (in Madden, he’s “NE Coach” instead of being called by name because he won’t join the NFL Coaches Association, which licenses coaches’ names for the football video game) and the press isn’t going to drive further investigations or punishments. But it will inspire people to turn against him now that the first ball has dropped, and it already is resulting in few coming out to defend his conduct, other than to say “everybody does it.”

The pressure is going to keep building, and the ultimate cost could be Belichick’s chance at being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Before Videogate, he was a shoo-in. Now, unless the whispering stops and it becomes clear as day that Belichick never cheated, or at least didn’t cheat more or in more nefarious ways that anybody else, Belichick’s career is going to be examined and re-examined like it’s never been before, with dribs and drabs of information adding up to a flood of problems.

Belichick, whatever the hit to his reputation and Hall chances, seems unlikely just to resign, and then salute as he walks onto the helicopter whisking him away. But we’ll know Belichick is at least getting worried if he grabs vice president of player personnel Scott Pioli, and demands that he pray with him.

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