Walsh has no smoking gun but Belichick has nowhere to run

NEW YORK -- Now that the NFL office has heard from former New England Patriots employee Matt Walsh, you can draw the blinds on Spygate. Its run is unofficially over.

Did Bill Belichick knowingly cheat? The Walsh tapes show he did. (AP)

There not only is no videotape of the St. Louis Rams' walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI, there never was a videotape of the Rams' walk-through, which means there almost certainly will be no more sanctions against the New England Patriots.

But that shouldn't obscure the facts here, and the fact is that someone cheated. More than that, it sure looks as if someone lied, too, and will Bill Belichick please step forward?

If there's anything that emerged from Tuesday's hearing with Walsh, it wasn't that he had no new evidence against the Patriots. We suspected that for the three-and-a-half months it took him to sit down with the commissioner.

No, what was intriguing here was that the story Walsh told was very different than what we've heard from Belichick.

Essentially, when Belichick confessed to videotaping last season he told the league office he "misinterpreted" the rules; that he didn't believe he was acting improperly or illegally because he wasn't using videotapes in the game where they were shot.

OK, fair enough. You take someone at his word until you hear or see something contrary, and something contrary is what Matt Walsh offered.

I'm not talking about his charge that the Patriots once practiced someone who was on injured reserve (a violation of the league rules). Or that he allegedly scalped 8-12 Super Bowl tickets for players, a charge the NFL will investigate.

Those were the two new pieces of information that emerged from the three-hour, 15-minute meeting between Goodell and Walsh, and big deal. It's not what we wanted to hear, and what we heard was that Walsh didn't have a videotape of the Rams' pregame practice, hadn't shot one, hadn't seen one and wasn't aware of one.

In other words, his story was, as Goodell put it, "consistent" with what the league knew of the Patriots' operation.

But when Goodell probed into the tapes in Walsh's possession -- six of which were shown to the media before Goodell's news conference -- he asked if the former Patriots' employee believed he was doing something wrong and if he thought he was acting in violation of league rules.

Walsh nodded.

"It was very clearly known by at least Matt -- he believed and he stated to us that it was very clear -- that he had to be careful that nobody discovered what he was doing," said Goodell. "He was very cautious about how he did it and who was watching.