1.0 out of 5 stars “The first thing every conspiracy buff knows: where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, January 27, 2014
By
BBTL - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spygate the Untold Story (Kindle Edition)
The positive reviews here are a testament to people’s willingness to believe anything that reinforces their own preconceived beliefs. This is an inherently dishonest book and author Bryan O’Leary unwaveringly slants the story through equal parts misrepresentation, speculation, fabrication and omission.
Anybody who checks his “sourcing” would soon realize the deceit. O’Leary’s attributions wouldn’t pass even the most lenient of newspaper or publishing house standards, so it’s no wonder the book is self-published.
Most egregious is his claim of a second helmet frequency. It’s the starting point for much of his baseless speculation, and the first thing he cites in interviews: “Did you know Tom Brady had a second frequency in his helmet that didn’t turn off at the 15-second cutoff?”
O’Leary cites two sources for the claim: a September 13th, 2007 Chris Mortensen report, and a fourth-person hearsay retelling of a Doug Flutie rumor.
Here’s what Mortensen wrote: “The league also was reviewing a possible violation into the number of radio frequencies the Patriots were using during Sunday's game, sources said.” O’Leary rewrote this in the first chapter as “the Patriots were also found to be in violation of exceeding the number of radio frequencies they were allowed to use during a game.” Later, he wrote it this way: “Chris Mortensen of ESPN reported that the NFL had caught the Patriots using an alternate radio frequency in violation of NFL rules.”
Mortensen never wrote that the Patriots were caught doing this, just that the league was “reviewing a possible violation”. And his report says nothing about helmet frequencies or 15-second cutoffs.
Had O’Leary kept researching the radio frequency claim, he’d discover a September 21st, 2007 Mike Reiss article that states the league investigated and “have no evidence to support that claim,” according to league spokesman Greg Aiello. On May 11th, 2008, Aiello repeated the same thing, saying the league found no proof of any manipulation of the coach-to-quarterback radio systems. Given O’Leary’s exhaustive Internet research, it’s doubtful he missed these Aiello quotes, but since they don’t support his narrative, well…
The other source for O’Leary’s “15-second cutoff” tale is a Doug Flutie rumor that ties back to ESPN’s Dan Le Batard. Here’s O’Leary’s telling of the story:
“Doug Flutie reportedly told John Saunders, a Canadian/American ESPN television analyst, that during one of his first games in New England, he accidentally picked up the wrong helmet with the green dot in the back (Tom Brady's backup helmet) and held it to his ear, so he could follow the play calling. This is something backup quarterbacks do often during a game. Flutie told Saunders that he was amazed that the coaches kept right on speaking to Brady past the fifteen-second cutoff, right up until the snap. In addition, the voice in Tom Brady's helmet was explaining the exact defense he was about to face. This story was revealed by Dan Le Batard, an ESPN contributor, on his talk radio show on The Ticket in Miami, Florida. Le Batard added, ‘We've tried to talk to Flutie on our radio show about it, but he hangs up on my producer.’”
Here was O’Leary’s sourcing:
7 Le Batard, Dan. "The Dan Le Batard Show." 790 AM the Ticket, February 1, 2008.
This is a useless attribution as there are no audio archives available of that show. I’m convinced O’Leary never heard it, but instead was quoting a Le Batard mailbag that was reprinted on countless football message boards. Here’s the actual Le Batard quote about Flutie from that mailbag:
"I've heard second hand about doug flutie being amazed when he got there that the plays were being piped into his helmet warning brady what was coming.....we've tried to talk to flutie on our radio show about it but he hangs up on my producer....."
The date of Le Batard’s quote was February 4th, 2008 (three days after the supposed radio show). The quote O’Leary used is obviously from the transcript, as he quotes word for word Le Batard’s “hangs up on my producer” line (Had it actually been from the radio show, Le Batard never would have said “on our radio show”) and paraphrases the “amazed” part. And once again, there’s no mention whatsoever of the “15-second cutoff”; O’Leary embellishes that entirely.
Don’t forget, this is a message-board transcript of Le Batard telling a story he heard (and he never says who told him the story) of something Flutie allegedly told Saunders. O’Leary’s at least four parties removed from the original “source”, and he never interviewed Flutie, Saunders or Le Batard to get verification. There’s no way multiple-party hearsay like this would ever pass any publication’s sourcing standards.
But here’s the beauty line from O’Leary: “This story has been circulating for years and Doug Flutie has yet to deny the story. He could simply take an interview and take back his words, but he allows the anecdote to remain unrefuted.”
Get that? In O’Leary’s tortured mind, the burden falls on Flutie to disprove fourth-party hearsay of something he may never have uttered in the first place. This is what constitutes proof?
In interviews, O’Leary embellishes even further. On a Buffalo radio podcast, he said this:
“They continue to talk to Tom Brady right through the snap, they're telling him what the defenses are, they're telling him perfect adjustments, and when he asks about it, he's told, 'Don't worry about it.' And when this story becomes known, of course many people want to interview Doug Flutie to get him to repeat it. Well, by then, he had been coached by the Patriots owner, fans, or whoever, so now he won't repeat it, but he also conspicuously doesn't deny it. So essentially, it happened or he'd be denying it.”
In addition to new story flourishes (“Don’t worry about it”), O’Leary says somebody muzzled Flutie. This is something of a habit for O’Leary, the paranoid delusion that anyone who won’t talk to him must have been silenced. When Mortensen wouldn’t do an interview, O’Leary said, “Why would he have need to not talk to me at all? The NFL's telling them in no uncertain terms to put the kibosh on it.“After Matt Walsh refused an interview, O’Leary tweeted, “Ever wonder why Matt Walsh never wrote a book about Spygate? R Goodell must have paid him off.” When no media member would give him the time of day, he tweeted, “ESPN won't have me on, they are in the pocket of NFL.” And recently, after Bill Cowher said Spygate had nothing to do with any of the Steelers’ losses to the Patriots, O’Leary tweeted, “how would Cowher know ? Covering scandal for NFL like everyone eating from that trough, ie NOT asking obvious questions.” Starting to sense the pattern here?
So the whole “15-second cutoff” line – the entire backbone for his “how it all worked” speculation – was never stated by Mortensen and wasn’t part of the Le Batard account of the Flutie rumor. O’Leary made it up out of whole cloth.
O’Leary’s second chapter opens, “The first thing every conspiracy buff knows: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Rational people know this isn’t true, and it especially isn’t true when even the smoke is manufactured.
Each new O’Leary claim is more ridiculous than the last, including:
• Ernie Adams is the true ringmaster, with the power to overrule every play call, even when the play is in progress. Belichick, per O’Leary, is no more than the team’s public face (because we all know how much he relishes and excels in that role). This all stems from the fact nobody knows what Adams does.
• The assistant coaches are worthless because they didn’t come from big football programs (Hope Don Shula – like Josh McDaniels a John Carroll alum – knows he’s worthless). In fact, the Patriots don’t look for coaches, but co-conspirators, since Adams knows every single thing that’s about to happen on the field.
• Tom Brady took a team-friendly deal because he knows his success is only a byproduct of the “Spygate apparatus”. He couldn’t hold out for fear of the secret of his success being revealed.
It goes on like this chapter after chapter. There’s nothing resembling proof for any of the claims; Just O’Leary’s fevered fantasies about “how this would work.” It would take a book twice its size to point out all the lies, fabrications and just sheer lunacy in this book.
O’Leary’s trump card, he believes, is his statistical analysis, but those studies are fatally flawed by the notion that NFL teams represent a homogenous population. Over the course of 11 seasons (the chosen range for the studies), there are too many variables to consider such as injuries, player turnover, and coaching turnover to be able to view these teams with any sort of sameness. The Patriots and the Eagles are the only teams that had the same coach over that 11-year span. And the Patriots had Brady for 10 of those years. How can that organizational consistency be measured against the Bills or Dolphins, who each had four coaches over the same span, or the Raiders, who had seven? Even Peyton Manning had three coaches over that time period.
And even if we accepted O’Leary’s statistical methodology, he still can’t play it straight. He omits the Patriots’ 5-11 year (which would skew the numbers); he says no other team averaged over 6 home wins a season, when in fact the Ravens did; and he keeps saying the Patriots were “three standard deviations” from the average, when in fact they were closer to 2 than 3.
The only mainstream interview O’Leary got was with the New York Post’s Bart Hubbuch (who, on the eve of a Pats/Jets tilt, recognized a good vehicle to tweak his readers when he saw it). O’Leary told Hubbuch he invested $30 thousand into writing and self-publishing the book. O’Leary published the Hubbch article on his website, save for the part where Hubbuch brought up the time O’Leary was fined and suspended by the NASD. Unable to be honest about anything, O’Leary wrote “Edited down for length”.
People can believe what they want about Spygate. But this book is simply the ranting of a pathological liar, packaged in $30,000 worth of tin foil.
