Bend, don't break: Coaches push NFL rules to the limit
PHOENIX - Kurt Warner recalls playing a board game with his brother one day as kids. When his brother briefly left the room, Warner had one of those soul-searching moments you see in the movies, with an angel perched on one shoulder and a devil on the other.
"Should I read his card?" Warner remembers thinking. He listened to the little devil — and looked. But when his brother returned, Warner immediately confessed. His better angel had won the day.
"I just couldn't do it," Warner tells USA TODAY Sports. He just couldn't cheat.
Not everyone is as honorable as the boy board-gamer who'd grow up to be the MVP of Super Bowl XXXIV for the St. Louis Rams. Cheating is as old as competition itself. Think of spitballs and corked bats, of doping horses and shaving points, of Lance Armstrong and the Faustian bargain of steroids.
The air time for air pressure in the run-up to Sunday's Super Bowl can seem excessive. Only a few know the nuances of pounds per square inch, but the story is oversized precisely because everyone understands the temptation to cheat — whether in a board game with your brother or in a football game watched by 100 million.
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Sophocles said he'd rather fail with honor than win by cheating, but he wrote plays, not playbooks. Consider the opposing coaches in Super Bowl XLIX. Seattle coach Pete Carroll came to the Seahawks from USC just before the NCAA placed the school on probation for various violations on his watch. And New England coach Bill Belichick's Patriots videotaped opponents' signals in the scandal that came to be known as Spygate, though he and quarterback Tom Brady profess innocence in the comic opera we now know as Deflategate.
The impulse to add the suffix "gate" to public scandal of any scale comes from Watergate, in which operatives for the Nixon White House burglarized the offices of Democratic National Committee chairman Lawrence O'Brien, who would go on to become commissioner of the NBA, where today players flopping to draw fouls is right on that line between gamesmanship and cheating.
"Rule breaking and bending are two different things," says Mike Pereira, Fox's NFL rules analyst and the league's former director of officiating. "A lot of coaches bend the rules to take creative advantage."
Pereira points to the unusual but legal formation that the Patriots have run in this year's playoffs, where an unbalanced line disguises eligible receivers. "Bend versus break," Pereira says. "Rules get bent, not necessarily broken."
Players who slather Silicone on their uniforms before games — a practice that Pereira says officials have been policing for more than 15 years — know they are breaking the rules. They do it anyway.
"Officials have to go in the locker rooms before the game starts and at the beginning of halftime to randomly pat down players to see if they have any foreign substance on their body because players would place Silicone on their jerseys which would make them harder to grab onto," he says. "We had to deal with that. We had a policy where if you found a player with Silicone on his jersey, then you confiscated the jersey and you threw it to the sideline.
"But it was still happening. By gosh, it's been so long you don't expect you have to send officials into locker rooms to check for substances like that. … Real fun job. You go in and go, 'Give me your left guard, your right tackle, your middle linebacker.' And you have to use your hands down the fronts and sides of their jerseys to wipe them down to make sure they're not wearing anything."
'THERE'S CONSEQUENCES'
ESPN analyst Herm Edwards, who coached the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs, says bending rules is fine, as long as you don't break them.
"Football really hasn't changed in that sense," he says. "There's always going to be players as well as coaches always pressing the line. And that's okay. And that's part of it. You have some players and coaches press the line more than others. You want to get as close to the cliff's edge, but don't fall over. And if you fall over the cliff, there's consequences, you face discipline."
The Patriots paid a fine and forfeited a first-round draft choice after the excesses of Spygate, which came during the 2007 season.
If they are ultimately found culpable in Deflategate — and the NFL said its investigation is expected to take weeks — penalties could be harsher this time around.
"You do have to take their history into account," Pereira says. "That's like player discipline for personal fouls. History plays into that, too."
Videotaping an opponent's signals is illegal, but trying to steal them in some other ways isn't.
"People are always trying to get your signals," Edwards says. "That's why guys go out and look at substitution patterns and why when (coaches) call plays, they put the play-card over their mouths. If you can get an edge but not compromise the integrity, hey, you're going to try to get an edge."
ESPN analyst Marty Hurney, former general manager of the Carolina Panthers, says he believes most teams trying to get an edge take care to stay inside the rules.
"I don't think it's fair to paint a picture there's blatant rule-breaking," he says. "Does everybody try to get a competitive edge? Yes. Every GM and coach, your job is to win as many games as you can within the rules. And sometimes if you break a rule, you address it and try to make sure that doesn't happen again.
"Rules are pretty clear. Every team knows what the rules are and where the line is. … Sometimes it might be a misunderstanding and they need a clarification of the rule. Nobody's perfect in this league. It does happen. You address that."
Miami Dolphins cornerback Bent Grimes figures air pressure and videotaped signals have little to do with winning games anyway.
"You still have to play ball," he says. "It's the rules. I see why somebody would be upset about it. But if you're just asking me, I don't think it makes that much of a difference."
WARNER'S DILEMMA
When Warner was quarterbacking the Rams in their "Greatest Show on Turf" era, he ran a play worthy of an Oscar, backing away from center and unsnapping his chin strap as he trudged toward the sideline, as if ready to call a timeout. That lulled the San Francisco 49ers defense just as running back Marshall Faulk took a direct snap and ran for a first down that led to a touchdown a few days before Christmas in 2001.
"I faked like I was mad and I was walking to the sideline and we snapped the ball," Warner says. "I tell you what — I still wrestle with that. It's within the legal boundaries of things, but I still wrestle with that."
Warner did think about that play when the Patriots ran the unusual formation that flummoxed the Baltimore Ravens in the divisional round.
"It's like our play. It's legal and all of that," he says. "But I don't feel good about it."
Warner plays pickup basketball these days. When he fouls another player, he calls it on himself rather than waiting for the fouled player to call it, as is often the custom in pickup games.
"Things that are potentially outside the rules, I don't have any tolerance for," Warner says. "There's too many guys who do play within the rules that deserve the opportunity to be successful against guys who are stepping outside the rules.
"Whether that's (performance-enhancing drugs), whether that's a Spygate-type thing, messing with the footballs if it gives them some sort of big advantage. If you play outside the rules, I don't have any tolerance for it."
The reason for Warner's principled stand, he says, is as simple as this: He believes some players have lost careers to cheaters.
"There are plenty of guys over the years that have done it by the rules and were right on the verge of having a career and they got beat out by the guys who didn't play by the rules," Warner says. "And that bothers me — somebody used PEDs and they just beat out somebody who did it all naturally."
Warner led the Rams to a win against the Tennessee Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV following the 1999 season. His Arizona Cardinals lost Super Bowl XLIII to the Pittsburgh Steelers following the 2008 season. In between, his Rams lost Super Bowl XXXVI following the 2001 season — to the Patriots, the first of six Super Bowls for Belichick and Brady.
"I felt like I've always done it the right way," Warner says. "And I've never stepped outside the rules and I've never allowed the guys around me to do that. I feel the only fair way to say we're all on even playing grounds is to say, 'May the best man win.' And if you lose, you sit back, pat them on the butt and say, 'You got me today.' Anytime the competition becomes anything outside of that it becomes unfair to somebody.
"And it can have an exponential affect on different things — on careers, money and the history of our game."