The biggest headline from one of the last semi-slow weekends of the offseason came from a report regarding the extent to which the Jets tampered with cornerback Darelle Revis in 2015, while he was still under contract with the Patriots. The news from Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News, a far cry from the dismissive tone he initially struck on the matter, indicated that the Jets used “private cell phones and face-to-face covert meetings at the 2015 Scouting Combine” to negotiate with Revis at a time when Revis was still a Patriot.
On one hand, it’s an example of what constantly happens at the Scouting Combine. As one team president told PFT several years ago, his team had resisted doing it until realizing that his team was at a competitive disadvantage because every other team was doing it.
Rarely, however, does a team do it while currently under investigation for tampering with the player with whom the team is currently tampering. As to the Jets in 2015, the NFL already was poking around in the aftermath of owner Woody Johnson’s il-advised declaration that he would “love for Darrelle to come back.” Although the NFL typically enforces the tampering rules only when it happens to notice that a team has both hands and its whole mouth in the cookie jar, Johnson’s comments amounted to a declaration that his team is coming for the cookies.
So what did the NFL do to investigate whether the Jets used burner phones to talk to Revis’ agents or met with them at the Combine to negotiate the deal he quickly would sign after becoming a free agent? The league had no comment when asked that question by PFT earlier in the week.
Consider the broader context. At the same time, the NFL was chasing wisps of air pressure to eventually prove (even though it failed to do so) that the Patriots tampered with footballs during an AFC championship game played after Johnson announced that a cookie raid was coming. So what was done to grill Jets front-office employees, to demand the surrender of cell phones (sounds familiar for some reason), and to otherwise get to the bottom of a rabbit hole that, as expected, contained a big, nasty, stinky, smelly rat? From the league’s perspective, we’ll never know.
A couple of other circumstances make this one even more intriguing. First, in July of 2015, Rod Graves took a job at the league office after spending two years with the Jets. What kind of interrogation, if any, did he face regarding the Revis tampering case before or after getting a job at 345 Park Avenue? Second, if/when the Jets cut Revis, will Revis spill the beans on how his then-terminated contract came to be?
So while this one ended two years ago amid a $100,000 fine and a cartoonish tit-for-tat tampering allegation after Patriots owner Robert Kraft said “[w]e wanted to keep” Revis and “we’re sorry he didn’t stay with us,” there’s still plenty more there. If the Jets decide to cut Revis in lieu of paying him a $2 million roster bonus next month, maybe Revis will have something to say about it.