It has been over 11 years since Super Bowl XXXVI took place between the New England Patriots and the St. Louis Rams. A game that the Patriots won ultimately. One would think that with so much time passing since the game, everyone would have accepted the results as what they were. If you ask one former Rams player however, he feels the team was cheated out of a ring.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has insisted there is no evidence that the Patriots spied on the Rams walk-through practice the day before the Super Bowl. Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk believes they did.
Per Tom Curran of CSNNE.com: “I’ll never be over being cheated out of the Super Bowl,” said Faulk.
“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.”
Strong, strong words from Marshall Faulk.
Do I believe the Patriots cheated? There’s no hard evidence for me to say yes.
As he said, we may never know the whole truth if those tapes were burned. So the result of the game is what it is as far as I am concerned.