The Gillette Stadium crowd was in full throat at the A.F.C. championship game in January, stoked to mock and tease the opposition by the team’s rascally leader, Bill Belichick, who stood on the sideline peering from beneath both a hoodie and a windbreaker against a driving rain.
A week earlier, in a home playoff victory against Baltimore, Belichick’s sly maneuvering of eligible and ineligible linemen had unnerved the Ravens, whose coach later griped and labeled the practice “deceptive.”
Belichick snickered at the charge. With a trip to the Super Bowl on the line in the next game, against the Indianapolis Colts, Belichick manipulated his linemen again, but this time he did it on nearly two-thirds of the Patriots’ plays, which forced the referee to announce a maddening refrain about a player reporting “as eligible.