The Newest NFL Scandal Goodell Will Cover Up: WalkieLeaks
Were the Giants listening to Cowboys playcalls via walkie-talkie? https://t.co/NDV3ejwI7d pic.twitter.com/C08J9NvbFa
— Dallas Cowboys (@ThemCowboysRR) December 16, 2016
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Yahoo! – The New York Giants might have violated NFL rules when they used a walkie-talkie on the sideline of Sunday night’s Week 14 game against the Dallas Cowboys when their communication system broke down. The Cowboys filed a formal report — remember those key words earlier in the week? — on the matter.
After the radio transmitter in Manning’s helmet stopped working early in the fourth quarter, Giants head coach Ben McAdoo used a walkie-talkie to transmit the plays to Manning. The league is looking into the matter; NFL rules stipulate that communication between the coaches and quarterbacks must stop when there are 15 or fewer seconds on the play clock. …
Manning told the Post that there were communication problems during a brief stretch early in the game against the Cowboys, and he might accidentally have implicated the team on the matter.
Obviously, this is going to be huge. An NFL head coach, breaking the rule about no two-way communication on the sidelines besides the league-issued head sets? The implications of that just stagger the imagination. Was Ben McAdoo sending plays in to Eli inside the 15 seconds limit? Was he getting calls from coaches upstairs? Or intercepting the Cowboys communcations? The possibilities are endless, and all of them are sinister.
It goes without saying that this is going to blow up, knock Trump off the cable news channels and front pages of the tabloids. One of the foundational franchises of the NFL being implicated in a major cheating scandal? This will rock America to its underpinnings and be the story future historians will look back on as the one from 2016 that changed the world forever.
Oh, right. It’s the Giants. Forget everything I said. They’re cool. I forgot for a second that we’re talking about the team owned by the Maras, that beloved and respected grand old family of the game. They’d never do anything wrong. Even when they covered up for Josh Brown who was regularly onsides-kicking the shit out of his wife, they were held up as bastions of integrity. So keep moving, folks. There’s nothing to see here.
So let’s ask the obvious question: What would the reaction be if Bill Belichick was on the sidelines hiding a walkie-talkie behind his play sheet? Fercrissakes he had a camera guy point a camera at the Jets sideline from a spot in the stands other than the designated pointing-cameras-at-the-other-teams-sideline area nine years ago, and the country still treats it like a bigger scandal than the Rosenbergs. There’d be demands for Belichick’s immediate firing and for the NFL to take away the Pats Super Bowls like they were John Calipari national titles.
But again, these are the Giants. Nothing will come of this. Because Roger Goodell practices Franchise profiling. The Maras will invoke their Giants Privilege once again, while the Patriots can’t walk down the street without getting a stop & frisk. And every piece of paper they carry gets checked to see if they fished it out of the trash barrel in the visitor’s locker room because they have a “record.”
I demand justice. Not just for the Cowboys, but also for the team that can’t get away with crimes just because of how much power and influence they have. Patriots Lives Matter.