Only four days after Rams Hall of Famer Orlando Pace resurrected suspicions about shenanigans at the final walk-through practice before Super Bowl XXXVI, a member of the new Super Bowl champions claims that the Eagles ran a phony walk-through practice before Super Bowl LII to counter any type of foul play. Appearing on 620 WDAE in Tampa, long snapper Rick Lovato said that the Eagles specifically didn’t run plays like the “Philly Special” at U.S. Bank Stadium. “We had run that play during a walk-through like two weeks ago,” Lovato said, adding that the Eagles purposefully did not run the play in Minnesota due to concerns that the Patriots may be watching. “I believe our whole walk-through was just a complete fake walk-through,” Lovato said. “We did it at the stadium. There were certain people walking around. . . . I believe I overheard someone say a lot of the plays we were running weren’t even in the playbook for the Super Bowl.” But why not take advantage of the opportunity to practice the actual plays in the stadium where the game was going to be played, one day beforehand? “We already had our game plan set all week for the last two weeks,” Lovato said. “We had two weeks to prepare for that game. A measly walk-through the day before the game, we weren’t going to show anything to anyone, especially being at the stadium.” There’s absolutely no evidence that the Patriots were watching the Eagles on Saturday or any other Super Bowl opponent prior to any other Super Bowl. Still, it apparently didn’t hurt the Eagles to conceal the plays they planned to run the next day, and to not run them one last time in a setting that was less-than-half-speed, at most.
Meh, no one runs their in-depth gameplan plays, trick plays, and hidden gems in walk-thrus in any territory that isn't in a secure environment anyways. That's always a given, or should be.
But I assure you, the reader, that I studied the catch rule thoroughly after Sunday’s events (Steelers vs Pats) and am prepared to answer all questions about catches. That’s why I have created this helpful Q&A you can reference the next time an exotic and new circumstance appears in an NFL game. I love to entertain but sometimes I want to teach. Hopefully this doesn’t get too technical. Let’s say a player catches a pass with two feet in bounds. Is that a catch? I don’t know. Let’s say a player catches a pass with two feet down but has the ball knocked out of his hands before he can move with it. Catch? I don’t know. OK, this seems easy. Let’s say he catches the ball, but as he’s going to the ground the ball pops loose on impact. Catch? I don’t know. What if a player secures the ball with two hands and, while falling to the ground, recites all the lyrics from Spacehog’s 1996 classic song “In the Meantime” before the ball comes loose on impact with the ground? I don’t know. What if after securing the catch, the first thing to touch the ground are the receiver’s balls, causing the receiver to scream, “Ouch, I sat on my balls!” before throwing the ball away in pain? I don’t know. What if the receiver catches the ball, takes three steps, attempts to hurdle a defender, is flipped so high into the air that he lands on top of the stadium, has to have a fire department come with a ladder to get him down, and, while he’s being carried down the ladder by a fireman, drops the ball into the stands. I don’t know. What if he was up on the stadium roof for an hour? I don’t know. What if a receiver catches the ball with his feet and gets two hands in bounds? Is that a catch? I don’t know. What if a receiver catches a pass in overtime, runs through the end zone, out of the stadium, across the street, into an airport, boards a plane, flies to Istanbul, meets a woman, dates her for six years, proposes marriage, gets married, moves back to America to accept a high school coaching job, coaches high school football for 40 years, receives a gym teacher of the year award, dies six years later, and is buried with the football he never put down for the rest of his life? Catch. Even if the ball is in the coffin with him and lowered into the ground, where both he and the coffin decompose, causing the ball to touch the dirt hundreds of years from now? Oh, I don’t know. What if a player catches the ball, gets two feet down, eats the ball, then pukes the ball on the field before he takes a third step? I don’t know. What if instead of puking up the ball, he poops the ball out the next day at home? I don’t know. What if a player catches the ball and, before anyone can tackle or touch him, he pulls out a gun and points it at the football and threatens everyone to stay away or the football gets it, and after a 12-hour standoff with referees, gently places the football on the ground? I don’t know. What if a player makes a catch, takes two steps, fills out the official NFL catch paperwork to declare his relationship with the football, has it stamped and notarized, files the paperwork with the league office and NFLPA, then fills out an Intent To Make A Football Move document but drops the pen and not the football? I don’t know. What if a player catches the ball in mid-air and, before he can return to the earth’s surface, the planet’s core explodes, which causes the loss of gravity as we drift off into space, but some of the dirt from the field touches the receiver’s feet as the ball slips into a black hole? I don’t know. What if a receiver catches the ball and gets two feet down, but his feet land on the back of an official, and then he uses the ball as a pillow under the wounded official’s head? I don’t know. OK, fine, I get it. Nobody knows with any certainty. But what if any of these possibilities occurred for the Patriots? Definitely a catch. And against the Patriots? Definitely not a catch. https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/qvwpzx/we-still-have-no-idea-what-a-catch-is-in-the-nfl
I'm just surprised how sloppy the cheating is. In this day and age where you can see through walls and place hidden cameras around the size of pinholes...Pats are running around with VHS recorders and 8track tapes. I'm still amazed fans are contrite with letting the officials spot the ball when even tennis harnessed the technology to spot a fault like 15 years ago. I mean even a drone with a simple heat sensor could capture the plays being run outside a dome.
And 20 years ago NHL hockey managed a way to track a puck across the ice. One would think that a billion dollar industry involved with a game that is decided by inches could figure out a more effective way to track a football than some old dudes wandering the sidelines with poles and a chain link.
If you just want high precision 3D tracking you can use an indoor GPS system (an IPS) that can give you centimeter-level accuracy. The problem is those devices are too bulky to put into a football without altering its physics. The NFL in 2017 already put RFID chips (which are tiny and weigh almost nothing) into their footballs, but RFID position tracking technology just isn't good enough to solve the problem. As this article says the precision is about 6 inches, which is too large for positioning the football automatically: http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/20618245/data-collecting-chips-every-nfl-football-2017 So the problem is coming up with a solution that doesn't alter the physics of the football and that's not easy.
Its naive to think that only the patriots try to look for advantages... but they do it the most so **** them
I've said it many times before and I'll say it again- cheating is cheating regardless of the means. I don't care if a team is using Pentagon-level spy technology or they're bribing someone to gain the slightest of insights- it's all cheating and should be dealt with exactly the same. When it comes to the Pats and Gillette Stadium, other teams have accused- - Missing playbooks - Bugged locker rooms - Bugged hotel rooms - People going through visitors trash at hotels/stadium - People with satellite receivers in the stands - Lip readers in the booth - Sudden interference (as if someone's listening in) in their headsets - Headsets shutting off completely at critical times in the game - Opponent playbooks being demanded from newly signed players - Extensive interviews of other team formations and tendencies - Detailed records of opposing team's plays - Shifting to illegal formations right before the snap (how they made it to the SB in the deflate year) - Declaring players receiver-eligible right as the ball is being snapped - Deflated footballs...and "The Deflator" in particular - Brady destroying evidence the league requested in an investigation - Highly questionable ref calls on the field - Even more highly questionable penalties not being called - The personal relationship between Kraft/Goodell Now, maybe all of those things are purely circumstantial and completely innocent. And maybe some other teams are guilty of those exact same infractions. But the kicker here that everyone likes to ignore is that the Patriots admitted to doing over half the things on the list above almost a dozen years ago at a league meeting. And at that meeting, newly appointed Goodell decided to sweep it all under the rug with a "my bad" approach as he told all teams that they couldn't do that stuff anymore. So the question here is not, "Did they cheat?" They openly admitted that they were cheating up to 2006 and assumed all the other teams were as well. The only question remaining is if they're still doing it 12 years later- and we definitely know that Deflategate happened. We saw the illegal formations and linemen declaring themselves eligible as Brady snapped the ball in the 2016 playoffs (the games leading up to and beyond Deflategate). Then we see this massive bias in penalties and it's not too hard to imagine that the rest of the stuff is still going on. Again though, these are not my observations- they are what other team executives have brought to the league and complained about since 2006. To me, it's far too much to just write off as coincidence after coincidence- the Pats are some cheating bastards and a disgrace to the league.