The righteous indignation has been immediate. News leaked that Bill Belichick was not voted a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and suddenly the football world clutched its pearls. How could the greatest coach of all time be “snubbed”?
That reaction only makes sense if you choose to remember Bill Belichick in pieces instead of as a whole.
Because Spygate was not a minor lapse. It was systemic cheating, executed with intent. The facts are not in dispute: unauthorized videotaping of opponents’ plays and signals, in direct violation of explicit league rules.
This wasn’t a toe over the line. It was a stride.
The National Football League understood that perfectly well at the time. That’s why the penalties against the New England Patriots were among the harshest ever levied on a franchise: a $500,000 fine for Belichick, a $250,000 fine of the Pats, forfeiture of their first round draft pick and public humiliation. The league did not treat Spygate as trivia. They treated it as a scandal.
But here’s the part that continues to get memory-holed.
The NFL did not come down even harder on Belichick because the league is exquisitely sensitive to negative publicity. Banishing the most successful coach of the modern era would have kept the story alive, invited discovery, and encouraged questions the league did not want asked. So the strategy was containment: punish the organization heavily, send a message, and make the problem disappear.
Which brings us to the name that almost always hovers just offstage: Ernie Adams.
Within league circles, Adams was long regarded as Belichick’s consigliere, the keeper of advantages. There are long-standing whispers about his role in pushing the Patriots’ edge-finding beyond what others dared attempt. Many around the league believe that what was exposed was merely the visible portion of a much larger, more sophisticated system.
That belief matters.
Because Spygate validated the rumors. It confirmed, beyond doubt, that the Patriots under Belichick were willing to violate clear rules if it produced competitive advantage. Once that threshold is crossed, skepticism about everything else is rational judgment.
And this is where the Hall of Fame outrage collapses entirely.
In baseball, writers have kept Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire out of Cooperstown for alleged steroid use even though, at the time, those substances were not explicitly banned. In other words, baseball chose moral judgment over technical legality.
Football fans now argue that documented, proven cheating should simply be forgiven.
That’s incoherent.
If baseball can exclude players for violations that lived in gray areas, then it is entirely justified that Belichick be denied entry to Pro Football Hall of Fame for cheating that was real, documented, punished, and widely believed to extend further than what could be cleanly proven.
And to be clear: I’m not arguing that Belichick will never get into Canton. I’m arguing that, as far as I’m concerned, he shouldn’t.
The Hall of Fame is a historical judgment. It exists to tell future fans not just who won, but how they won. Belichick’s record includes the most consequential cheating scandal in modern NFL history and a cloud of credible suspicion that it was not an isolated act.
That demands restraint.
If voters hesitate, that is the Hall doing its job.
Belichick changed football.
He also broke it.
History is allowed to remember both.
