Stickum, hand signals, holding under the shoulder pads, hard counts, reaching the ball past the first down marker no matter what…
It’s all “cheating” to some degree, but in a world of high end competition, you do what you have to to win, and sometimes you get caught and then you get penalized.
The videotaping the hand signals, so to study them, adds another element, but now it makes it so the competition committee has to think of new ways to get the plays to the defense, like a speaker in the helmet, which they did. Also, it makes things on the D side of the ball a bit pedestrian when you are using the same signals all the time for every team.
I don’t think it is that big of a deal, and now the competition is better. That was a smart thing to do, especially if no one else was doing it, which may not be the case.
We’ll see what happens now, and after, and as you can see, the PAtriots still won all of their regular season games after the scandal broke and it proves nothing except they were an exceptional team.
Now we can move on…

I wonder if he told the coaching staff to change their defensive signals at halftime because they were being videotaped?

To me that isn’t cheating. I know the Pats did that with Freddie Smith a few years ago, and to tell you the truth I didn’t have a huge problem with it then. If a team wants to talk to a cut player or fired coach, so be it. Maybe teams should pay players and coaches to insure they won’t talk to other teams.

There isn’t a single thing in that article that proves, or even leads me to believe that the Bills have ever cheated.

So what, some OL coach called Jim McNally and gave him a heads up about some defensive formations. That isn’t cheating.

Asking a recently signed FA how to gameplan against his last team isn’t cheating.

This spygate thing is out of control. The Pats wouldn’t have had time to learn a team’s signals mid-game and use them in the second half. Walsh even said that he didn’t give the tapes to Belichick and the coaching staff until after the game.

EVERY team in the league steals package signals. Nobody cares that the opposing team knows 5 seconds earlier than they would otherwise that an offense is going with 4 WRs or 2 TEs or that a defense is using a dime or nickel package.

Stealing signals in an attempt to decode them and learn what plays the opposing team is running would be absurdly complex. I don’t know how much of an advantage the Pats got by trying to do so, but I feel confident assuming that they didn’t know anything about what play the opposing team was going to run over 90% of the time. They maybe knew the Offense was going to throw or run a few times a game and they probably knew if a certain position (C, S, WLB, SLB) was going to blitz a couple times a game. Its not like they had some secret sheet of paper telling them what every play was going to be.

The reason it was a big deal is because it was specifically against the rules. There isn’t a rule saying that you can’t look over at the other side of the field and watch the coaches signal to their players. There is a rule saying that you can’t videotape the opponents signals. It is that simple. I’ve been trying to avoid a spygate discussion here, but I just had to say all that. Spygate is over and done with in my mind and I hope to never talk about it again.

I have changed the article title to the more informative, and more accurate: “Gamesmenship vs. Cheating”

Thank you all for your thoughts on this, this is how we ALL as Bills fans grow in our understanding and knowledge of the game. I may know formations and how to play it, but it doesn’t mean I know a whole lot about the others aspects at times.