Patriots' Belichick says Walsh isn't credible (AP)
39 minutes ago
BOSTON - New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick lashed out at the team's former video assistant Friday, saying in a televised interview that Matt Walsh was a low-level staffer who was fired for "poor job performance." "There's not a lot of credibility," Belichick said in an interview broadcast on "CBS Evening News."
"You know, he's tried to make it seem like we're buddies, and belong to the same book club and all. That's really a long, long stretch."
Belichick acknowledged that he was wrong about NFL rules prohibiting filming opponents signals but insisted there was no intent to hide what he was doing.
"I made a mistake," he said in the interview. "I was wrong. I was wrong."
That rationale has already been rejected by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who fined the coach $500,000 and docked the Patriots $250,000 and its first-round draft pick.
"I didn't accept Bill Belichick's explanation for what happened," Goodell said Tuesday, "and I still don't to this day."
But Belichick repeated that Walsh had been fired for "poor job performance" and for making a tape recording of a meeting with player personnel director Scott Pioli. Belichick has said he didn't even know Walsh.
"For him to talk about game-planning and strategy and play-calling and how he advised coordinators, it's embarrassing; it's absurd," Belichick said. "He didn't have any knowledge of football. He was our third video assistant."
In an interview with HBO scheduled to air Friday night on "Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel," Walsh dismissed Belichick's attempts to minimize the impact of the taping. Walsh told HBO he was coached on how to evade NFL rules, and that team officials instructed him on ways to avoid detection.
"When I was doing it, I understood what we were doing to be wrong," Walsh said. "Coach Belichick's explanation for having misinterpreted the rules, to me, that really didn't sound like taking responsibility for what we had done, especially considering the great lengths that we had gone through to hide what we were doing."
Belichick denied telling Walsh to hide what he was doing.
"You look at the tape. You see him filming the game," the coach told CBS. "You tell me how discrete it is."
Belichick's comments came on the same day the Boston Herald printed a front-page story by John Tomase, who wrote on the day before New England's Super Bowl loss to the New York Giants that the Patriots had taped the St. Louis Rams' walkthrough before the 2002 NFL title game.