The coach who led the Rams to a Super Bowl win in 2000 doesn’t believe the Patriots’ spying led the Rams to lose the Super Bowl in 2002.

Dick Vermeil, who coached the Rams to the title against he Titans in 2000, tells the Associated Press that he doubts any type of cheating is the reason the team lost to the Patriots when Mike Martz was the coach in 2002.

“Personally, I don’t think it had any effect on the game,” Vermeil said. “That stuff’s been going on forever and I don’t think you gain from it. But if people are doing it they must think it’s making a contribution.”

Vermeil was responding to the Boston Herald report that a member of the Patriots’ staff taped the Rams’ final walkthrough before the Super Bowl. The next day, the Patriots upset the Rams 20-17.

The 71-year-old Vermeil, who said suspicions of teams taping their opponents have gone on as long as he’s been in football, said he thought any information a team could get from spying on an opponent’s final practice would be limited, and that it could even be counterproductive in that it would cause the team to over-emphasize what it discovered in the walkthrough.

But, as Vermeil noted, any coach who engages in spying wouldn’t do it if he didn’t think he was gaining a competitive advantage from doing it.