Roger Goodell is still working to make the NFL’s image pristine. Whether or not he’ll ever truly succeed, he’s certainly not holding anything back on his quest.

The latest of his punishments is a stiff fine dished out to the New England Patriots, with an emphasis on Bill Belichick. The crime? Cheating. More specifically, spying on other teams and stealing signals to benefit his own squad.

Goodell’s response: a $250k fine to the team, loss of a first round draft pick if the team makes the playoffs (otherwise a 2nd or 3rd rounder), and, a $500k fine to Bill Belichick. That’s a little more than 12% of his yearly reported salary of $4 million and it’s Roger Goodell’s way of saying, “don’t cheat.”

The problem is that Belichick doesn’t care. Or, at least, he’s not showing that he cares.

Here’s his statement:

I accept full responsibility for the actions that led to tonight’s ruling. Once again, I apologize to the Kraft family and every person directly or indirectly associated with the New England Patriots for the embarrassment, distraction and penalty my mistake caused. I also apologize to Patriots fans and would like to thank them for their support

It’s essentially an apology for getting caught. He doesn’t promise that he will never do it again. He just says, “Sorry. Next time I’ll be more careful.”

Would Sunday’s game against the Jets have been different without the reconnasiance work? We’ll never know.

“We seem to have tarnished Barry Bonds,” said Colts head coach Tony Dungy, comparing the recent actions of Belichick to the criticisms of Giants slugger Barry Bonds. “We’ve pointed out that, even though he’s a great player and he’s hit a lot of home runs, because of what some people that work around him have done, it seems to have tarnished him in the court of public opinion. We’ll see.

“He (Robert Kraft) is going to have to answer questions all the time, from here on out. When headsets go wrong, he’s going to have to answer if it’s something that just happened or is this planned. There’s bad grass everywhere, but when the grass doesn’t grow up there, he’s going to be asked about it, and that’s too bad.”

Subscribe to The NFL Minute

This post is tagged