Buried in a profile of former Colts left tackle Tarik Glenn resides a stunning admission about the steps taken by his former team to deal with the disruption that comes from excessive sound.
Already suspected (but never actually proven) to have piped in crowd noise, the Colts apparently had a system for dealing with noise elsewhere.
“We were playing on the road, it might have been Peyton’s rookie year, and it was really loud,” Glenn told Clifton Brown of the Indianapolis Star. “Peyton [Manning] hadn’t mastered the silent count, so [former offensive line coach] Howard Mudd had us wearing these hearing aids that were supposed to muffle the crowd while projecting the quarterback’s voice.”
A “hearing aid” or any type of electronic device would amount to a clear and blatant violation of the rules.
Manning was a rookie in 1998, so the chances of the league venturing down that rabbit hole are slim. But the question remains whether the Colts continued to use it beyond 1998, and if so for how long?
Given that it went undetected in 1998 by the Colts, here’s another question: Who else has done it? Moreover, who else is still doing it?
That’s the one thing we’ve learned about the various cheating scandals of the last decade. All teams cheat in one form or another; only a few ever get caught. In most of those cases, they get caught when the league wants them to get caught.