I mean up to that point we weren't as successful since Spygate if you think about it. We went from 3 Super Bowl wins and another AFCCG appearance (totaling 4) to 5 AFCCG apearances (counting the one that year) and 2 Super Bowl losses.
There was a reason the NFL cited Spygate when they punished us. There were lots of reports that owners were livid over Goodell destroying the tapes. They just should have taken it out on Goodell, not us.
Kraft has been making the other owners look horrible to their fanbases for over 2 decades.
THINK:
The poor jamoke in Miami or Dallas or DC who has to pay a small mortgage for a PSL for a team that hasn't won two playoff games in years learns that the Dynastic New England Patriots don't even burden their spoiled fans with what is now STANDARD in the NFL for any stadium built since the dawn of the century.
That is going to cause "trouble" with the customers. That is an existential threat to their franchises.
They NEED a reason to explain why one franchise has dominated while charging their customers far less, privately funding a state of the art stadium and not ransoming several hundreds of millions of dollars from their states.
Money makes the world go round - - and the New England Patriots present an EXISTENTIAL THREAT to their competitors from a business view.
Jones, Irsay, Woody,etc know that the Krafts are Amazon and they are Bradlees.
Hell, the Krafts were already marketing the Patriots in China in the 1990's.
Defamegate was not about this:
It was about this:
Guess who were the hardliners in the owners room during that time? Guess who, in the words of the starting center of our biggest rivals and Peyton Manning's best friend said "This sis the man who saved football"? Kraft left the bed of his dying wife to do that. How does THAT look to the paying customers of Jones, Woody, Irsay, Snyder, etc. I can tell you as I live in the DC suburbs.
THAT is what Defamegate was all about. Notice the difference between that and the Zeke case. The #1 million fine to the ownership and the draft pick dockings.
When it comes to it all being about Goodell, its too bad so many fans are gullible enough to fall for the story of the men behind the curtain.......
.