Add Will Witherspoon to the list of people who think the Patriots cheated before their Super Bowl win over the Panthers.
Although it hadn’t received as much attention as some of the other allegations against the Patriots, there seems to be a feeling among many in Carolina that New England taped the Panthers’ practices before Super Bowl XXXVIII. Witherspoon said in an interview on WFNZ 610 The Fan that he and his teammates suspected the Patriots of spying on them.
“It does make you wonder,” Witherspoon said. “We all sat there and said, ‘How do they know what we’re doing? This is ridiculous.’ . . . It can’t be possible. There’s no way they knew this was coming. But they did.”
But Witherspoon’s specific accusations — that the Patriots seemed like they knew what the Panthers were going to do — could just as easily be the result of good scouting and film study as cheating. Absent any actual evidence that the Patriots spied on the Panthers, it’s unfair to assume they spied just because their game plan against the Panthers was successful.
Unfortunately for the Patriots, they’ve now been busted by the NFL twice, in Spygate and in Deflategate. And that means every allegation of cheating will be given credence, whether there’s any evidence to go along with that allegation or not.