The Patriots’ Super Bowl XXXVI victory over the Rams happened 17 years ago. A bombshell report from the Boston Herald that the Patriots filmed the Rams’ final walk-through practice before that Super Bowl emerged 11 years ago. And the Herald’s apology and acknowledgement that “we now know that this report was false” came 10 and a half years ago. But some Rams still believe the Patriots cheated.
And that even includes some Rams who weren’t part of that team. Dick Vermeil, who retired from the Rams two years before that Super Bowl, and Eric Dickerson, who was traded away from the Rams 15 years before that Super Bowl, are among those calling the Patriots cheaters today.
Vermeil said he’s rooting for the Chiefs to beat the Patriots on Sunday because “They’ve done it the right way. They haven’t been accused of cheating.”
Vermeil didn’t explicitly say he was referring to the Super Bowl against the Rams (he may have been referring to Spygate and/or Deflategate), but Dickerson made no secret that he still believes the long-debunked accusation about filming the Rams before the Super Bowl.
“We want a rematch in L.A.,” Dickerson said on FS1. “We want them back again, because they cheated us. They know they cheated us back in New Orleans. They watched our film.”
More than a decade after the Boston Herald corrected its story, that story is apparently never going away.