Peyton Manning told salacious tales on his “Monday Night Football” broadcast of the Patriots bugging his locker at the Colts’ old RCA Dome.
Too bad his allegations are all recycled.
On Monday’s “Manning-Cast” of Packers-Lions, Peyton and Eli Manning talked about the paranoia they experienced whenever they played the Patriots. “Every time I played against New England, I used to talk to my receivers in the showers,” Peyton said. “I’m like, ‘Don’t talk about a play next to my locker because I know it’s bugged. I know it’s got a hot mic in there.’”
Manning’s jovial tone suggests he’s gotten over the alleged subterfuge, and it’s worth noting he maintains a close relationship with Tom Brady. But still: Manning’s accusations are bound to restart another media cycle of the “Patriots are cheaters” talk.
So let’s set the record straight on a couple of things.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Manning’s fears regarding his locker being bugged. Back in 2010, Peter King reported that Manning thought the Patriots were listening to his conversations at Gillette Stadium, prompting him and former offensive coordinator Tom Moore to huddle outside of the locker room.
Then in 2015, Tony Dungy confirmed Manning thought the visitor’s locker room at Gillette was bugged. “I know that that is very true, and, you know, as Peyton talked to guys who played for the Patriots, some of the guys who came over — whether it’s true or not he treated it as true,” Dungy said on The Dan Patrick Show. “We didn’t have a lot of strategy discussions inside the locker room there.”
Around that time, there were a slew of stories released about the Patriots’ supposed cheating ways — ranging from plausible to ridiculous. Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr. published an expose connecting Spygate to Deflategate in September 2015, containing stories about the Patriots sending advanced scouts to opponents’ games to film signals and ordering team employees to swipe playbooks from the visiting team’s hotel.
That same day, Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated penned a companion piece, outlining allegations about the Patriots going through trash cans and giving opponents warm Gatorade. Earlier in 2015, Rosenberg wrote an easily disprovable report about the Patriots using Gillette’s parking lot TV to decide whether to challenge plays.
This was during the onset of Deflategate, a scandal largely centered around Chris Mortensen’s erroneous report about air pressure in the Patriots’ footballs.
While we’re at it, Spygate, though stupidly brazen, was about where the Patriots were filming the opposing sideline — not that they were doing it.
Manning’s tales about the Patriots may sound juicy. But they’re really just old.