Two intriguing reports emerged on Friday afternoon regarding members of the Browns, Josh Gordon and Johnny Manziel. In both cases, the team in position to know the truth declined to say the reports aren’t true.
Regarding Manziel and the scathing scouting report supposedly leaked by the Patriots, coach Bill Belichick didn’t say the report is false. Actually, Belichick didn’t say much of anything, like he typically does.
“With all due respect, I hate to admit this but I don’t think I’ve been online in a couple days or weeks or whatever, so that’s not really an important thing to me,” Belichick said, via Tom Curran of CSN New England. “I don’t even know what’s online and what isn’t online. But I would say we probably have, I can’t even imagine, 10,000 pages of information. It’s a lot of information. There’s no way I can sit up here and tell you that I’ve read it all. I’ve read a fraction of it. But we have a ton of information on all the players that are in the draft. What’s online, you should go talk to the geniuses that are online. I don’t know. MyFace, YourFace, InstantFace. Go talk to whoever you want that does that stuff. I don’t know.”
It’s funny and it’s quirky and it’s quintessential Belichick, the guy who acts like he’s above anything that isn’t what he cares about or knows about. But it’s unfair to the Browns or Manziel for Belichick to be flippant about a topic that possibly represents an effort by someone with the Patriots to smear Manziel by leaking confidential internal documents to the media.
Belichick should be far more concerned about the situation, both as to the fact that it harms Manziel and as to the possibility that it could happen again in the future.