by Ian O'Connor
Oakland Raiders overlord Al Davis forfeited a couple of draft picks in the early 1980s for illegally stashing players and ignoring the roster limit, and in the 1960s he masqueraded as a reporter when probing an opposing player for valuable information. If the Raiders had a fast team visiting, Davis made sure his grounds crew either watered the grass or let it grow high to slow down the track. The coach of the San Diego Chargers, Harland Svare, once was so certain the Raiders had bugged his locker room inside the Oakland Coliseum that he looked up at a ceiling light fixture and shouted, “Damn you, Al Davis. Damn you, I know you’re up there.” (Davis later said, through a smile, “The thing wasn’t in the light fixture, I’ll tell you that.”)
Davis was well known for filming opponents and for signing players released by division rivals to pump them for information. He was also known for offering $500 for a copy of an opponent’s playbook, according to a rival scout. One of Oakland’s linebackers, Matt Millen, said Davis had a sign, “The Raider Rules,” posted above the locker room door. “Raider Rule No. 1: Cheating is encouraged,” Miller said of the sign. “Raider Rule No. 2: See Rule No. 1.”
In January 1983, the most prolific NFL winner of all time, Don Shula, won the AFC Championship Game over the fleet New York Jets on an Orange Bowl field turned into a mud pit by torrential rain and the decision to leave the field uncovered. Shula correctly argued that the choice to use or not use a tarp wasn’t his to make, as the Orange Bowl was run by the City of Miami. But Shula was one of the most revered figures in Miami and the entire sport. It’s hard to believe that one phone call from him wouldn’t have ensured that the field was covered.
In the mid-1980s, during the Giants’ two playoff victories over the San Francisco 49ers, Bill Parcells thought Bill Walsh broke the rules in a vain attempt to secure an early edge. Walsh used to script his first 15 plays, and Parcells said that in both playoff games, San Francisco’s headphones suspiciously stopped working, which forced the other team to discontinue using its phones. “Now, let me get this straight,” Parcells said. “You’ve got your script rehearsed, you know what you’re going to do, the defense doesn’t know what’s coming, but they have to take their phones off?”
Bill Belichick, an admirer of Al Davis, was merely a creature of this culture. Spying was all the rage around the NFL, and so was the filming of opposing coaches. Some league executives, scouts, and coaches weren’t even sure what was allowed and what wasn’t when it came to Sunday surveillance, and some football lifers almost yearned for the day when pushing the envelope was considered a virtue, not a vice. They found a certain romance in the old-school tricks of the trade.
“Remember the prison guy who snow-plowed the field in New England for that field goal?” said John Teerlinck, maybe the NFL’s all-time best defensive line coach, recalling the 1982 Patriots’ victory over Miami. “That’s how the game used to be played. Parcells in Giants Stadium opening the tunnel for the wind . . . People have been cheating or bending the rules or trying to get an edge from day one.”
A former defensive end with the San Diego Chargers, Teerlinck was part of Bud Carson’s staff in Cleveland before Belichick arrived. He said that in a 1989 game against Cincinnati, Browns defensive tackle Michael Dean Perry wore a wireless microphone in his pads for what was supposed to be a TV piece on the sounds of pro football. “And they said it would only last a quarter,” Teerlinck recalled. “It will get hit and knocked loose and the wires will come off. It was bargain-basement stuff that was jerry-rigged. At the time, Cincinnati was having that no-huddle with Sam Wyche and Boomer Esiason calling everything at the line. We played them, and guess what? After listening to the tape, we could match up and we knew every goddamn call they were making at the line of scrimmage. Every play, every audible, every snap count.”
Teerlinck admitted that he was not above taking liberties with league regulations. He was once summoned to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s office to answer for all the quarterbacks his 1996 Detroit Lions were injuring—especially on shots to their legs.
“We knocked five quarterbacks out in six weeks,” he recalled, “and they couldn’t believe the stuff we were doing. We had our jerseys tailored, our pads cut down. I took the numbers off the jerseys and made them silkscreen so the offensive linemen couldn’t hold them. There are so many games within the game, people have no idea . . . The media and the league office are so goddamn naive; they’re afraid in the league office to know how the sausage is made. If they knew, they’d shit.”
Floyd Reese, longtime NFL coach and executive, was coaching in Houston when a stranger from another team approached him in an elevator, introduced himself, and revealed that he’d been trying to steal his signals for three years. Kevin Gilbride was a Houston Oilers assistant in 1989 when one of Houston’s video guys approached him with a strange question. “How would it feel to be a movie star?” the staffer asked. Gilbride didn’t know what the man was talking about until he explained that the Oilers’ upcoming opponent, the Browns, would have a camera trained on Houston coaches as they sent in signals from the sideline. “They’ll be filming you so the next time they play you they’ll have our signals,” the staffer told Gilbride, who was in his first year in the NFL after coaching 15 seasons in the college game and in the Canadian Football League.
It was apparent that plenty of NFL coaches were playing loose with the rules. Belichick’s friend Jimmy Johnson said he’d been told by a Kansas City scout years earlier that the Chiefs were filming opponents. “I did it with video,” Johnson would say, “and so did a lot of other teams in the league . . . A lot of coaches did it. This was commonplace.” Johnson also said that some NFL coaches “have selective amnesia, because I know for a fact there were various teams doing this.”
Veteran scout and personnel man Dom Anile, first hired by Browns coach Sam Rutigliano in the early 1980s and later promoted by Belichick, was considered one of the better spies in the business. “I guess everybody cheats to some degree,” he said. “You cheat and push the envelope until it’s almost over the edge, and you hope to stay within the rules.”
Hope. Anile studied tapes of an upcoming opponent to identify its signal caller, and then he’d attend that team’s game on the Sunday before it faced the Browns. Anile didn’t want to scout from the press box, the place everyone went to spy, so he’d enter the stadium and try to find a seat in the stands facing that signal caller. If it was a full house on a particular day, Anile had to get creative. One day at a packed Giants Stadium, desperate to find a seat that would give him a clear look at the coach in question, Anile approached a man with a young son at a hot dog stand, told the man he was a Sports Illustrated writer doing a story on NFL spying, and offered him $100 if he’d be willing to put his son on his lap and give Anile the boy’s seat. Anile told the father he’d have his notebook and tape recorder out all game, so he needed to be left alone in exchange for that $100. The man took the deal, and the spy went to work.
Anile was working for the Browns’ coach, Marty Schottenheimer, with offensive line coach Howard Budd acting as the buffer. “Marty knows I’m doing this and likes the idea I’m doing it, but wants nothing to do with it,” Anile recalled. “He turns it over to Howard. I would go back to Howard and sit down and go over the game with him . . . I would make stick figures for Howard to describe what I was seeing. I’d describe down, distance, the ball is here, and a coach would make like a Pac-Man move, clasping his hands together. And Howard would take all that information I gave him and go look at the tape of the game I saw and see that down and distance and the time I gave him. He may not have seen the guy on the film, but he knew what was a Pac-Man-designation play.
“What we looked for,” Anile continued, “was a home-run ball, center field being vacated at the snap of the ball for whatever reason when they were going to blitz. Some guys around the league were doing this with cameras. I was working my tail off with a tape recorder doing this. Howard Budd came to me on days the Browns were not playing, and we’d sit
somewhere in the stands during a Cincinnati Bengals game . . . Howard was on the sideline on game day watching that guy across the way, and when he saw the Pac-Man figure, he knew there would be a vacant center field . . . The center would let [Bernie] Kosar know, and he would check off to any play we had to a center field pass. We would hit home runs all the time.”
Anile described the signal caller’s every motion on his tape recorder, and on Mondays he turned his information over to the coach assigned to make sense of it all. The coach matched up the opponent’s Pac-Man signal with an empty middle of the secondary and presented it to Schottenheimer. During the game, the Browns’ center looked to his sideline for the signal for zero coverage, and when he received it, he passed it on to Kosar through a sign or a word. The quarterback then alerted his wide receiver the same way. “And all of a sudden,” Anile said, “six on the board. Boom, just like that.”
Other scouts were known to pay scalpers for seats in the stands so they wouldn’t be seen in the press box by fellow scouts and spies, and their intel was invaluable to a capable quarterback. Ernie Accorsi was working with the Baltimore Colts in 1977 when they used an administrative assistant to read lips to help them win the AFC East title. Bob Colbert was the former head coach at Gallaudet, a university serving the deaf and the hearing-impaired, and he had lip reading down to an art and a science. The Colts were playing the New England Patriots in the final regular-season game, and they needed a victory to finish 10-4 and win the divisional tiebreaker.
Down 24–10 in the third quarter, Baltimore faced a third-and-18 from its own 22-yard line when Colbert used binoculars to read the lips of Patriots assistant Hank Bullough from the press box. “Delayed double-safety blitz. Delayed double-safety blitz,” Colbert saw Bullough call out to the New England defense. The lip reader relayed that call down to a coach, who relayed it to Colts quarterback Bert Jones, who then found Raymond Chester for a 78-yard touchdown. The Colts won the game, 30–24.
“From the films,” Jones fibbed afterward, “I knew that Chester should be open down the middle if I could get the ball away. That was all there was to it.”
Jones’s former Baltimore colleague Bill Belichick was an active participant in the rampant rule-bending and rule-breaking going on in the NFL while he was coaching the Browns. One of his defensive starters said that a Cleveland staffer filmed signals and had an assistant coach on the sideline who “would put a certain hand up, and he had three or four wristbands on. That would mean we got the play and they’d send it in.” This defensive starter said the signal was relayed to the Mike (or middle) linebacker, who then checked the defense into a proper alignment. Sometimes the Cleveland coaches were right, and sometimes they were dead wrong. On one play his coaches mistakenly thought they’d decoded against the Steelers, the Browns’ starter said, a Pittsburgh offensive lineman blasted him into next week.
“He almost took my life on one play,” the player said. “We thought we had their call on film, and they did something totally different . . . Belichick was filming in Cleveland, and without a doubt other teams were doing it, too. Everybody was doing it. I can tell you right now, in 1993 and ’94, we were trying to pick up stuff. It was done through a VHS camera in the stands. I don’t know who did it, but I know we got some signals . . . I would be at places and see guys filming, and they had the nerve to have an Oakland Raiders shirt on, looking at us and our coach from the stands. And I’d be like These guys don’t look like fans. They’re putting a camera on us. Fans just tape. Fans don’t shoot a play, put the camera down, and write down notes. You could tell espionage from a mile away if you had half a brain.”
Belichick asked one of his Browns scouts to attend a preseason game between the Giants and the Jets, and to keep working after the game was over, according to a Cleveland staffer with knowledge of the assignment. Belichick told the scout to wait for the Giants and Jets coaches to vacate their booths and then to enter them and “see if you can find anything in the garbage can.” This was in line with a 1992 Marla Ridenour story in the Columbus Dispatch in which a Giants scout explained how Belichick had attended a playoff game with him and personally picked through garbage cans in the winners’ and losers’ booths for leftover material after the coaches had left. “We went home with two garbage bags,” the scout said.
Belichick always believed that the espionage game was played on a two-way street. In 1991, with his 4-4 Browns preparing to play the 0-8 Bengals, Belichick announced that he was closing practice to the media and suggested that Cincinnati had gotten its hands on some classified Cleveland information. The Browns had beaten the Bengals 14–13 on a late Matt Stover field goal in September. “I just can’t explain some of the things that happened in that game,” Belichick said.
But his own dirty tricks inspired the league to summon a Cleveland executive to New York to answer for various suspected infractions, according to a Browns official, including stashing allegedly healthy players on injured reserve and preventing league checkers from having full and immediate access to his team. One Cleveland official questioned Belichick about his roster size in camp after realizing that, by his own count, the Browns were two or three players over the limit. Belichick told the official that it wasn’t true and that he shouldn’t worry about it. “I learned not to ask him about it anymore,” the official said.
One prominent Browns player said that Belichick was “the master of stashing guys” who were healthy on injured reserve as a means of keeping them away from other teams. This was a fairly common practice around the league among coaches who saw potential in certain players but didn’t have room for them on their rosters. One Browns source said that Belichick also had a way of outfoxing league checkers sent to camps to make sure teams were complying with roster limits and were not using players on IR in practice. The source said there was a time when Belichick decided practice jerseys should be just brown and white, with no assigned numbers to identify the players. At first the source thought this was a way of keeping information from the news media.
“But I figured out that when the league sends checkers to make sure injured reserve guys aren’t practicing—and we had extra players at the time than you’re allowed—that’s why he did it,” the source said. “So the league checker would go out to the field and he’d have a roster with numbers, and the deal in the NFL is you can’t hesitate when a checker comes. He IDs himself, gives a badge, and goes right to the practice field. He gets a roster, and there are no numbers on our jerseys. He’s trying to count. Seven guys go into the training room, five guys come out. Eight guys go into the training room, four guys come out. Pretty soon we quickly had numbers on our jerseys.”
The league still embraced a Wild West mentality when it came to honor and sportsmanship, or lack thereof, through the 1990s, and Belichick wasn’t about to be outgunned. “If the possibility of an advantage is greater than zero, we’re going to do it,” one of Belichick’s players said. “The extent of how great the advantage is meaningless . . . The way he views the rules, in my opinion, is how you view the tax laws. You’re going to interpret them as much in your favor as you can. And if the IRS comes knocking, you might be wrong, but you tried your best.”
“I don’t think Bill Belichick believes in cheating,” one of his scouts said. “I got to know his dad a bit. That’s not how he was raised in the game. But he was raised to know how to use rules to his advantage, and he does that better than anyone in the league.”
On arrival in New England in 2000, Belichick had a staffer videotape the coaches’ signals from the enemy sideline, and he had his personal mad scientist, Ernie Adams, study the filmed signals and match them up with the opponent’s plays that had been dissected by Patriots scouts. From the press box, Adams had a direct line to Belichick down on the field. Though coaches on the sideline could communicate to quarterbacks via their helmet radio devices—introduced in 1994—up until 15 seconds remained on the play clock, reducing the need for hand signals and the dummy cards with strange dra
wings and sayings prevalent in the college game, no defensive players were allowed to use such audio equipment. (New England was among the teams to vote against a proposal to allow one defensive player on each team the same radio device used by quarterbacks.) So if Adams recognized an opponent’s defensive signal from a past game and relayed that information to the sideline in time for an adjustment, the Patriots could carry a significant competitive advantage into that play.
Over time, teams became aware of the Patriots’ practice of taping their coaches, including the division rival Buffalo Bills, who defeated New England 31–0 in the 2003 season opener before losing the season finale at Gillette Stadium by the same score. New England had used a no-huddle offense in that second game, forcing Buffalo’s defensive coaches to signal in their calls quickly and, at least theoretically, giving Tom Brady time to wait for his coaches to intercept those calls based on their surreptitious film work and then relay them to him before the snap. Brady had no touchdowns and four interceptions in the loss to Buffalo, and he had four touchdowns and no interceptions in the victory over Buffalo. Bledsoe was an abysmal 12 for 29 passing, for 83 yards, in the second game, and he was sacked three times and intercepted once before being replaced. As Bills offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride was walking off the field that December day the season ended in a heap, he heard Bledsoe tell a New England player, “Man, you guys were great. It was like you knew just what we were doing.” According to Gilbride, the New England player responded, “We did. We had you on film.”