What about Bob? Glauber's NFL Blog

While Roger Clemens was the big draw during bombshell hearings on whether he did or did not use steroids and/or HGH during his career, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had his long-awaited meeting with Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-Penn).

Specter had summoned Goodell to express his displeasure with the NFL's destruction of the Spygate tapes they had confiscated from the Patriots. And while it did not appear that any new ground has been broken, Specter didn't entirely drop the matter.

And Specter said he'd been told during the meeting that Patriots coach Bill Belichick had been taping opponents' defensive signals since 2000, the year he took over as Patriots' coach.

Specter and Goodell met for close to two hours, and Goodell again defended his decision to destroy all the tapes that had been confiscated. Specter disagreed, saying the NFL needed to preserve "the evidence." My sense is that Goodell did the right thing to destroy the tapes, and that his punishment of Belichick and the franchise, which included the removal of the team's first-round pick in 2008, as well as fines totaling $750,000, sent a strong message.

Specter argues that destroying the tapes amounts to destroying evidence - as if this were some sort of criminal prosecution that would result in jail time. But what good does it do to keep them at this point? They were examined, the punishment was doled out, end of story.

Evidently not to Specter, however.

The one area left unresolved center on former Patriots video employee Matt Walsh, who may know whether the Patriots illegally taped the Rams during their walkthrough the day before they played the Pats in the Super Bowl after the 2001 season. But Walsh has said nothing to the NFL, and Specter is hoping to convince him to speak directly to Congress.

Until Walsh says what he knows, there will be no further ramifications - either for the league or Belichick or the Patriots. If he has a tape, then he must give it up. If he doesn't, then he needs to say so and move on.

Goodell says he's willing to re-open the matter if he finds new evidence. But so far, he hasn't found it.

And with all due respect to Sen. Specter, I would suggest that there are far bigger problems this country has to solve than to argue about the destruction of a handful of NFL tapes.

Amen.

- photo from ABCnews.com

... really.

It was a few years into Brady's career with the Jets, and he was struggling to live up to his billing as a first-round pick. If you recall at the time Brady was drafted, then Browns coach Bill Belichick was so ticked off that the Jets took him ahead of Cleveland in the 1995 draft that he threw a phone against the wall and promptly traded down with the 49ers. But Brady turned out to be less than anyone expected. At least as a pass catcher.

Anyway, I had written a sidebar the day before about Brady actually having a decent game. I believe it was the Jets' 24-14 win over the Patriots in the 1998 season, when he had five catches, two of which were touchdowns. In the sidebar, I'd written innocuously that Brady had "decent speed."

The next day in the locker room, Brady comes over to me and challenges me on the comment.

"Who said I had only decent speed?" he said.

"Huh?" I said, stunned that he would choose those two words.

"Who said?"

"Well, scouts did when you were coming into the draft."

"Oh, yeah, what scouts?"

I'm like, what is this guy thinking?

"I don't know. Scouts."

So then Brady says, "You think you're fast? Huh? Huh?"

"What?"

"You think you're fast? C'mon, let's go outside right now and race."

"You've got to be kidding me."

In my head, I'm thinking, if I go outside and race him, and if he pulls a hammy, what the hell is Bill Parcells going to do? To Brady AND to me?

"No, let's go out and race, right now."