Last night’s ManningCast included (as it will throughout the season) an extended visit from former Patriots coach Bill Belichick. At one point, Belichick admitted that he had secured a critical piece of inside information before Super Bowl XXXIX, against the Eagles.
The information turned out to be inaccurate.
“That was the Terrell Owens game,” Belichick said. “We went into the game — T.O. had gotten hurt a couple weeks before. And my team doctor, you know, said that he talked to his — saw the X-rays, saw his doctor, whatever — and said there’s no way that this guy’s gonna be able to play, and if he did he wouldn’t be able to run. Otherwise, we had to double the hell out of T.O. but he wasn’t gonna play, he wasn’t gonna do anything.”
Owens played. And it became obvious fairly early that he would play well.
“I looked over at the doctor, I’m like, ‘Can’t run? Like, this guy looks like the best player on the field,’” Belichick said. “So he goes nine [catches] for 122 [yards] against us. We had to change the game plan after the first third down. But, I mean, he was a man on a mission. But we practiced the whole week thinking that he wouldn’t play.”
It’s a funny story, to be sure. But it includes a fascinating nugget. How did New England’s team doctor get access to material, non-public information about Terrell Owens’s health? Although Belichick’s comment was muddled (“saw the X-rays, saw his doctor, whatever”) there’s enough there to raise eyebrows regarding whether someone said something that shouldn’t have been said — and whether Belichick specifically asked his team doctor to try to finagle information not publicly available.
The irony (if that’s the right use of the word) is that the information the team doctor secured was not correct. Still, there’s something that seems a bit off about the fact that New England’s team doctor “saw the X-rays, saw his doctor, whatever” to get information about Owens’s recovery from a broken ankle he had suffered seven weeks earlier on a then-legal horse-collar tackle by Cowboys safety Roy Williams.
