Altering Footballs Not The Only Way A Team Can Try To Gain An Edge
By Ashley Dunkak
@AshleyDunkak
CBS DETROIT - Before the explosion of "DeflateGate" following the AFC championship game in which the New England Patriots used footballs not inflated to league specifications, few would have ever considered the possibility of a team trying to gain an edge by altering the amount of air in its footballs.
As much attention as New England's indiscretion has received, altering footballs is hardly the only way players and teams try to push the envelope in hopes of securing a slight advantage.
The increased scrutiny of television and social media has limited opportunities for players and teams to covertly toe the lines established in the rule book, but many still try. The line between cheating and gamesmanship is one players are expected to walk, but for some, the distinction does not matter.
Scott Ostler, a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the 2008 book "How to Cheat in Sports," gathered from his research that many players feel they should do anything they can - legal or otherwise - that might help the team.
"I can't say this is the case for every guy in the National Football League, but I think the line is whatever you can get away with," Ostler said, "and also the risk-reward. You're probably not going to do something that will maybe gain you a first down is the penalty is that you'll be suspended for a season or something like that ... but basically I think it's the law of the jungle: whatever you can get away with."
These days, disguising penalties ranks as one of the top ways to circumvent NFL law. Linemen are particularly notorious for incessant rule-breaking, as are wide receivers and defensive backs, who constantly battle as they prepare for the ball to arrive. Holding and pass interference – by both offensive and defensive players – happen all the time, and often they go unchecked.
"You can avoid [being called for] holding by hiding your hands," explained longtime sports writer Terry Foster. "You're holding them on one side while the other one you make sure it's nice and loose and let everybody see it."
In order to get away with holding, linemen keep in mind which areas an official will be watching. The same type of awareness allows wide receivers and defensive backs to mask their contact.
"What guys do now, they keep their hands low, and they're grabbing and they're tugging and stuff, and they let go real quick," Foster said, "because referees - our human nature is to look up high rather than low."
Ostler recalled an anecdote from Tim Brown, a Hall of Fame candidate who was a wide receiver for the Oakland Raiders. Brown amassed nearly 15,000 receiving yards in his career, and along the way he made an art of creating extra room for himself to make catches.
"He said what he would do to defensive backs, he would trip them, and he had a way of kind of faking one way and sticking his leg out and tripping them, and it would look like they just kind of tripped themselves," Ostler said. "It was very effective, and it worked a lot."
In today's NFL, if a player makes a habit of breaking the rules, other players turn him in. If someone discovers a tricky way to hold or interfere, it will not stay a secret for long.
"It makes them really mad," Foster said. "What they do is they go to officials and tell them during the game what he is doing, and if that doesn't work, they will go to their position coach or head coach, and they will report to the league and say, 'Look, this is what this guy is doing. We don't appreciate that. Look at the game film.' And then I think sometimes if the league is aware of it - they say they don't - they'll tell the officials, 'Hey, look, look out for this. This is what this guy's doing.' They'll get called for it."
Every team turns in plays to the league every week that they believe officials got wrong or missed entirely, and conversations ensue about those calls and non-calls. Teams will usually not discuss the content of those talks, and it is generally not reported unless there is significant controversy brewing, as there was after the Detroit Lions-Dallas Cowboys wild-card game and as there is now with the Patriots heading to the Super Bowl thanks to winning a game in which they broke a rule.
Try as they might, officials cannot call everything, and players know it.
"One guy told me, he was a special teams guy, he told me that he cheated on every play he was ever involved in, kickoff, kick return and all that stuff," Ostler said. "He said every guy cheats on every play. They can't call it all, and they can't catch it all, so it's just mass chaos. Everybody's illegally tackling, illegally grabbing, and it's just a matter of survival that you just do that because everybody does it."
Individual players are not the only ones looking for an advantage. Teams try to decipher each other's signals and play calls. Those efforts are why coaches often cover their mouths with a clipboard when they talk and why boards with pictures or symbols have become a commonplace way of calling plays.
"It's kind of like a counterespionage thing," Foster said. "If you stick with your pattern, I think by the end of the game they will find out. That's why now we're seeing signs with a cupcake and Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Lopez, so they're trying to do different things to circumvent things. When a play's being called in, you see three different quarterbacks doing stuff; two are fake, obviously, and one is real, because they know that they're trying to steal signs, so I think they're trying to steal signs every play, every game. I also think they look at TV to see what's going on ... That's why they pick up the pad and put it in front of their mouths because they know that somebody has a live feed that is trying to read lips and tell them what might be coming and stuff. We see a lot of the preventions, like, 'Okay, we know you're up to no good, so here's what I'm doing to kind of counteract that.'"
With television cameras providing multiple angles of almost every moment of every game, and with the tendency of social media to instantly spotlight indiscretions, players cannot get away with near the violations they could years ago. Back before the NFL grew into the behemoth it is now, players took much more leeway with the rules.
"The main thing was the stickum on the arms, the knees, because when the ball would get there, you would catch it," Foster said. "Particularly in double coverage or whatever, you would get that ball because you didn't really have to catch it. You just had to attempt to catch it, and that ball would kind of stick on it."
Skill players were not the only ones to find it helped them to apply various substances.
"Guys used to slime their jerseys because if you're a lineman, there's a lot of grabbing," Ostler said, "so if you put slippery stuff on your jersey, that really helps what guys can do. They would get that nonstick cooking spray, Pam, and they would spray each other with that to make it harder for the other team to grab them. Bill Romanowski was a known and avowed cheater. He would not only spray his jersey, but he would put - and other guys would do this, too - Vasoline in certain spots, make it even slicker."
In the past, home teams would also make sure to keep their visitors from getting too comfortable. At the University of Iowa, opposing teams were treated to a pink locker room. More often, teams focused on temperature as a means of making life harder on the opponent.
"If it's a hot day, you have the opponent sit on the sunny side of the field, you're on the shady side; if it's a cold day, you're on the sunny side of the field and the other one is in the shade," Foster said. "Also back in the day - and this doesn't happen anymore - the home team would provide heaters for their guys and the other side they wouldn't have heaters ... There's been times with locker rooms, locker rooms had been saunas, and guys are all sweating and everything, and so, 'Can you turn the heat down?' 'Oh yeah, we'll get to it.' Eventually they would get to it, but it would be a little bit late. Or you would go in and the locker room would be cold."
Ostler said that while coaches might not spearhead the efforts to gain an edge at the expense of the rules, rarely would they stand in the way of a player going the extra mile.
"I get the impression that, for instance, I doubt that there were any coaches that said, 'Hey, I want you to go in there and spray your jerseys with Pam,' but I also feel strongly that based on the guys that I talked to and everything, there were no coaches that said, 'Hey, whatever you do, don't go spray your jerseys with Pam,'" Ostler said. "It was a look-the-other-way kind of thing. Again, you can't say every coach is a cheating guy, but they know players do stuff.
"As long as there's a chance it's going to help them and they know other teams are doing it – and who wants to be the most pure guy in football anyway?" Ostler said. "It's just like any other sport. It's just rampant, especially at the big league level."
The Patriots are the latest to be called to the carpet for evidently trying to covertly break the rules, but they would not be the first to get creative in seeking an edge. If history is any indication, they will not be the last.
