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Jimmy Johnson Defends Snubbed Bill Belichick by Admitting that the Cowboys Also Tried to Cheat
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The big NFL news on Wednesday is that Bill Belichick reportedly did not get enough votes to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. It’s crazy on the surface, considering how many Super Bowls the guy won and how many successful years he had in New England alone, but there’s some scuttlebutt that he’s being punished by the voters because of Spygate and Deflategate.
Here comes Jimmy Johnson then to defend Belichick by saying he also tried to cheat:
“Let me tell you what, a lot of the teams in the league did this. In fact, we actually got it from Howard Mudd, who was the coach for Kansas City at the time. He told us exactly how to do it, to film the opponent’s signal caller on and on. We tried it. It was such a mess, we weren’t any good at it.”
Jimmy is basically saying that the voters shouldn’t hold it against Belichick because everybody was cheating, or trying to cheat. Nobody should be naive enough to be surprised by this, but it’s a funny thing to admit with the purpose of defending someone. It would be like the 29 other baseball teams coming out to defend the Astros by saying that they were also trying to bang on trash cans and just couldn’t figure out the proper way to do it.
This whole thing just opens a can of worms, doesn’t it? It’s kind of like the steroid era with the baseball hall. Do those guys deserve to get in or not? If we hold it against one guy, don’t we have to hold it against all of them? Likewise, if the voters are setting a precedent that Belichick should be punished for Spygate, Deflategate, whatever, then what’s the conversation like if Lane Johnson, for example, ends up on the ballot? Does he have to serve some arbitrary punishment because of the PED suspensions? It’s a Pandora’s Box kind of thing, but it makes for some good content and 10,000-word think pieces.
Regardless, we can all agree on one thing, that the New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys can both fuck all the way off. Go Birds!
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com