Former NFL general manager Marty Hurney has some seriously strong feelings about the New England Patriots Deflate-Gate scandal currently dominating NFL headlines.
Hurney, who was the GM of the Carolina Panthers when they appeared in and subsequently lost to coach Bill Belichick and the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVIII, believes that the latest speculation regarding alleged cheating by Belichick and the New England franchise is just another drop in the bucket, another unfortunate feather in the cap of the Pats head coach and the "culture of cheating" he's developed within his program.
"To me this isn't about 'DeflateGate', this isn't about anything having to do about any particular game last week,'' Hurney said, on his weekly radio show on Charlotte's ESPN 730 AM, per ESPN. "And it certainly isn't fodder to get by the first week before the Super Bowl. This is about a culture. Is there a culture of cheating at probably what most people look at as the best franchise in the National Football League?''
Hurney's Panthers lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl at the conclusion of the 2003-04 season, the first of two successive New England Super Bowl victories. It was revealed in 2007, via the "Spygate" scandal, that the Patriots had been engaged in a practice of illegally videotaping other team's walkthroughs and defensive signals.
Speculation arose that the cheating - which resulted in Belichick being fined $500,000 and the NFL stripping the team of their first-round pick in the 2008 NFL Draft - had been ongoing since 2000.
"There isn't a day that goes by since 2003 that I haven't questioned ... that there were some things done that might have been beyond the rules that may have given them a three-point advantage,'' Hurney said during his radio show. "And I can't prove anything and that's why I'm very angry.
"And the anger has come back over the last couple of days that commissioner Roger Goodell decided to shred all of the evidence after 'Spygate,' because I think there were a lot of things in there that would bring closure to a lot of people.''
Hurney says that even now, the loss and the rumors of the Patriots alleged cheating haunts him.
"You go to 'Spygate' after our Super Bowl and things came out about a rumor about a video guy, and he had tapes and he goes to Hawaii and kind of disappears. ... These are all rumors and I can't substantiate any of this. But it gnaws at you," he said.
As for the current "-gate" dogging the Patriots and Belichick, stemming from the findings that 11 of the 12 balls they used in the AFC Championship Game were under-inflated, Jason Cole of Bleacher Report says that NFL sources tell him the investigation is ongoing and there is "much work ahead" before it will be concluded and punishment will be doled out.
"In talking to an NFL source, what that source said is there's 'much work ahead.' They indicated there's a lot left to do in this investigation, it's not going to be a two or three day investigation that NFL executive Troy Vincent indicated it was gonna be early on," Cole wrote. "It's going to take much, much longer it appears right now."
