New website documents how your favorite NFL team cheated

Accusations range from taping signals to performance enhancing drugs, and from tampering to salary cap shenanigans.

By Jared Dubin

May 14, 2015 at 10:21 am ET • 3 min read

"Who cares? Every team cheats."

That's one of the most common responses to the Deflategate scandal, right up there with "Tom Brady is a cheater that needs to be punished" and "How dare you call Touchdown Tawmy a cheatah!"

Well, now there's a new web site, YourTeamCheats.com, which shows exactly how often your favorite NFL team has "cheated," and what their specific violations were. Each instance of "cheating" is catalogued, labeled as team-specific or leaguewide, and given a rating on a scale of zero through five video cameras (presumably a reference to Spygate) that helps determine where they rank on the cheating scale. Some of these instances of "cheating" are specified on the site itself as not being against the rules, but are still listed there anyway, with a caveat we'll explain below.

Let's use my favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, as an example. YourTeamCheats says the Cowboys have a "cheatscore" of 20, 10th-lowest in the league, and the site describes them as "a touch below average cheaters." The leaguewide "cheating" instances the site implicates Dallas in are:

Tampergate -- Tampering with free agents, which the site states every team does and is now "legal."
Headsetgate -- Visiting teams' headsets have malfunctioned while playing road games against Dallas.
Spygate -- Until 2006
Spygate again -- The site claims every team still steals signals, based on a quote from an anonymous player.

Yes, the site does annoyingly use the "gate" form of naming the specific "cheats."

Anyway, the Cowboys-specific "cheating" allegations the site levels are:

Salarycapgate -- The Cowboys used the recent uncapped year to frontload contracts. (It's still unclear how this constitutes cheating and not just refusing to engage in collusion like the rest of the league, but we're not going to get into that.)
PEDSgate -- Three times since 1990 the Cowboys have had a player test positive for PEDs, though one of them was a coach (Wade Wilson) and one of them was Orlando Scandrick's positive test for molly last season.
Tampergate -- Jerry Jones' phone call with Adrian Peterson.
Horsegate -- Former Cowboys defensive lineman Tony Casillas says that when the team was winning Super Bowls in the 1990s, players frequently used a medication meant for horses, which the site considers cheating even though it states that the substance used was not a banned substance at the time.
Partygate -- The Cowboys hosted head of officiating Dean Blandino on a party bus before last season, as our Jason La Canfora reported at the time.
Cheapsgate -- The Cowboys "are one of the few NFL teams who, this decade, have not had a player suspended or penalized more than $25,000 for a cheap shot or dirty tactics." It's not clear how this constitutes cheating.
Spygate (90s) -- Jimmy Johnson stated that the Cowboys would videotape signals and sync it up with game film to learn more about teams' play calls, which the site states was not against NFL rules.

There's a list like this for every single team in the league. The accusations are given a severity rating, specify who the "victim" was, whether the team was punished, and then if it wasn't, usually states "but it's more probable than not that this was cheating," (emphasis not mine; it appears that way on the site) which basically gives away that the person who made the site is a bitter Patriots fan, but is also pretty funny.

Here are the "cheatscores" the site assigned each NFL team, sorted by division.

Cheatscores
NFC EAST	NFC NORTH	NFC SOUTH	NFC WEST	AFC EAST	AFC NORTH	AFC SOUTH	AFC WEST
DAL - 20	CHI - 20	ATL - 28	ARI - 13	BUF - 16	BAL - 35	HOU - 16	DEN - 49
NYG - 35	DET - 28	CAR - 20	SEA - 25	MIA - 22	CIN - 16	IND - 37	KC - 16
PHI - 28	GB - 27	NO - 23	SF - 31	NE - 25	CLE - 13	JAX - 12	OAK - 27
WAS - 37	MIN - 23	STL - 14	TB - 25	NYJ - 40	PIT - 46	TEN - 20	SD - 19