It’s been 11 years since the Rams lost to the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVI, but former Rams running back Marshall Faulk isn’t over it, because Faulk believes the Patriots cheated to win.
Although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has insisted that there’s no evidence that the Patriots spied on the Rams’ walk-through practice the day before the game, Faulk still thinks they did.
“I’ll never be over being cheated out of the Super Bowl,” Faulk told Tom Curran of CSNNE.com.
The NFL fined the Patriots and head coach Bill Belichick, and stripped the Patriots of a first-round draft pick, for taping opposing coaches’ signals in violation of NFL rules. But the separate allegation that the Patriots taped the Rams’ walk-through before the Super Bowl was never substantiated. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league destroyed all the tapes that were confiscated in the investigation of the Patriots’ taping practices, and Faulk is skeptical that the whole truth will ever come out.
“Obviously, the commissioner gets to handle things how he wants to handle them but if they wanted us to shut up about what happened, show us the tapes. Don’t burn ‘em,” Faulk said.
Faulk says the Rams installed new plays for the game against the Patriots, and that the Patriots seemed to be so perfectly prepared for them that Faulk believes they must have used espionage.
“I understand Bill is a great coach,” Faulk said. “But No. 13 [Kurt Warner] will tell you. Mike Martz will tell you. We had some plays in the red zone that we hadn’t ran. . . . And a couple of plays on third down that we walked through also . . . And they created a check for it. It’s just little things like that. It’s either the best coaching in the world when you come up with situations that you had never seen before. Or you’d seen it and knew what to do.”
Faulk seems to believe Belichick and the Patriots got off easy for Spygate.
“Am I bitter about how the league handled them taping people? If Bountygate was that bad and Sean got suspended for a whole year? If we want to talk about some unfair assessment of how we’re assessing things? Man. If you lost a game and your brother cheated you, you’ll remember that.”
And 11 years later, Faulk still remembers a Super Bowl that he believes the Patriots stole.