The refrain, albeit flawed, from any New England Patriots hater is that they haven't won a Super Bowl since Spygate. Meaning, they needed to cheat to win Super Bowls.
And former Carolina Panthers general manager Marty Hurney unloaded years and years of anger in one radio segment in which he basically said he wonders if the Patriots cheated them out of Super Bowl XXXVIII. The Panthers lost that game 32-29. The Patriots' past, and specifically the Spygate videotaping scandal that unfolded in 2007, has been brought up numerous times this week after questions about how almost all of their 12 game footballs in last Sunday's AFC championship game were under-inflated.
Hurney's explosion came on Charlotte's ESPN 730 AM, in which he hosts a show. The quotes were transcribed by ESPN.com:
"There isn't a day that goes by since [then] that I haven't questioned ... that there were some things done that might have been beyond the rules that may have given them a three-point advantage,'' Hurney said. "And I can't prove anything, and that's why I'm very angry. And the anger has come back over the last couple of days that commissioner Roger Goodell decided to shred all of the evidence after 'Spygate,' because I think there were a lot of things in there that would bring closure to a lot of people."
Goodell destroyed all evidence after ruling on the Spygate scandal of 2007, a decision that goes down as one of his many questionable moves as commissioner. It allowed people to wonder if there was more on the tapes than the NFL said.
One of those people is Hurney. Included in his rant was a very serious allegation that people have told him they think the Patriots might have been taping their pre-Super Bowl practices in Houston.
"There are people who swear to me that the Patriots taped our practice down in Houston during Super Bowl week," Hurney said. "I can't prove it. I don't know. And I hate talking like this because I feel like a bad loser, but it just gnaws at you and this latest incident brings it back up."
Obviously there has been no proof that the Patriots taped the Panthers' practices, and it's fairly reckless of Hurney to say that on air. But he obviously has been holding this in for a while, and the latest Patriots controversy gave him the reason to let it all out.
"To me this isn't about 'Deflategate', this isn't about anything having to do about any particular game last week,'' Hurney said, according to ESPN.com's transcript. "And it certainly isn't fodder to get by the first week before the Super Bowl.
"This is about a culture. Is there a culture of cheating at probably what most people look at as the best franchise in the National Football League?''
The Panthers had their own skeletons come out of the closet from that season. An investigation by the Charlotte Observer in 2006 stated many Panthers players used performance-enhancing drugs during that NFC championship season. Even if Hurney brought this up during his radio rant ("The organization didn't know anything about it, and we took steps and we addressed that," Hurney said), him railing about how the Patriots might have cheated them out of a Super Bowl comes across as hypocritical, hollow and foolish.
But even if Hurney comes off as the sore loser (and he does), plenty of people will be on his side. There are legions of NFL fans who have tried to dismiss the entire Patriots dynasty because of Spygate. The latest deflate-gate controversy just gives them more reasons to pile on.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdowncorner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
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