We knew Bill Belichick was desperate to win that elusive fourth Super Bowl championship when he took a flier on Randy Moss.
Apparently so desperate his Hall of Fame bust might now read: “Some considered him the Vince Lombardi of his era. Others considered him the Richard Nixon of his era.”
Anyone who has Tom Brady throwing the football and Moss catching it and is so devious and paranoid he has to resort to I Spy should go by the name Bill Belitrick.
Or Bill Belicheat.
Combine Belichick’s well-documented dalliance with a former Giants secretary with the bombshell ESPN report that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has found him guilty of violating league rules by videotaping Jets defensive signals and here’s what you have:
Sex, lies and videotape.
Question: What is the proper punishment?
Allow me to play NFL Commissioner for a day.
I say the impending loss of a high draft choice, another pick and a prohibitive club fine doesn’t go far enough.
I would explore several options:
n Play the game over. The Patriots didn’t beat the Jets fair and square. In other words, the Jets wuz robbed. This strikes at the integrity of the games.
The bye week for the Pats and Jets falls on Nov. 11. The Giants host the Cowboys that day. So I would schedule Jets-Pats for Nov. 10 – six days after Pats-Colts in Indianapolis. The loss of their bye week, however, would be blatantly unfair to the Jets, and undoubtedly not tolerated by the union.
n Let Belichick wrestle Eric Mangini in a winner-take all in the Weeb Ewbank Hall parking lot, but check carefully under Belichick’s hoodie before the start.
n Wait, I got it.
Switch Jets-Patriots in New England Dec. 16 from Foxboro to Giants Stadium. You heard me right. A ninth home game for the Jets, and a loss of revenue for the Pats (the precedent is there; Katrina moved Saints-Giants to Giants Stadium, remember?)
We’re in luck here because the Giants host the Redskins at 8:15 that night. A 1 p.m. start would give the grounds crew time to tidy up the field as best it can. If that’s not feasible, schedule the game for Dec. 15.
n If the Patriots refuse, they forfeit the game.
Goodell needs to send NFL coaches the same kind of stern message he sent NFL players when he suspended Pacman Jones for a year for his Above the Law behavior.
Belichick is supposed to be too much of a genius for this type of sinister behavior. He is supposed to have too good a team to go out of his way to gain a competitive advantage.
Obviously, he subscribes to the credo “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”
Has he been driven mad by the fear that his pupil, Mangini, will threaten his stranglehold on the AFC East?
Is the thought of losing to the Jets, the team he left in the lurch and referred to as NYJ the day he bolted when Bill Parcells stepped down after the 1999 season, too much for him to bear? Was he that worried that Chad Pennington would gun down Tom Brady in a shootout?
Or was he merely searching for weapons of mass destruction on the Jets sidelines?