In a Tuesday afternoon interview with WEEI in Boston, Pats quarterback Tom Brady addressed the harping of former NFL players in the media about the videotaping of defensive coaching signals.

Asked one the hosts:  “Does it surprise you some of the former players who are in the media now who just seem to be clueless about this whole thing?  I’m stunned by it.”

Said Brady:  “It’s just kind of the environment right now, though.  I think that’s the way that guys make it.  They just say the craziest things. . . .  That’s what ESPN has become.”

We agree with Brady.  And we were amazed by the insistence of guys like former Broncos offensive lineman Mark Schlereth that the videotapes created by Matt Walsh were used in the same game.  Any moron (even Schlereth) could see that the final product was the result of an editing process that made the thing easier to watch.  It would simply be too cumbersome to forward and/or rewind through the raw tape during the three total hours of a game (including a 12-minute halftime) to make any use out of this information in the second half.

Moreover, if the purpose of the taping was only to use it in the same game, why did the taping continue into the second half?

The bottom line?  Schlereth is part of the ESPN agenda aimed at making some/any story out of this matter.  Since there was no videotaping of the Rams’ walk-through prior to Super Bowl XXXVI, the media needs to talk about something else.

And so Schlereth and others are yammering about the videotaped signals being used for in-game adjustments, and pondering how that diminishes the Pats’ run of success this decade.

Meanwhile, Schlereth hasn’t once mentioned the tarnish on his own pair of Super Bowl rings because the Broncos cheated on the salary cap from 1996 through 1998.  Though the cause-and-effect as it relates to the on-field product isn’t as obvious, circumventing the cap in order to avoid having to cut a veteran and replace him with a street free agent results in a higher quality team.

Indeed, let’s consider this quote from Schlereth, which he offered up on ESPN Radio on Tuesday afternoon:  “This besmirches to the organization to the point where regardless of how you look at these three championships that they’ve won over the last seven, eight years you will still always look at them and say ‘Yeah, but . . . they had this Spygate thing, how much of it was inappropriate, how much cheating went on, and how much did it help them during the course of some of those games?”

Now, let’s revise it a bit, and apply it to Schlereth’s Broncos:   “This besmirches to the organization to the point where regardless of how you look at these [two] championships that they’ve won over the [two] years you will still always look at them and say ‘Yeah, but . . . they had this [salary cap] thing, how much of it was inappropriate, how much cheating went on, and how much did it help them during the course of some of those games?” 

Frankly, we think we prefer an intellectually honest guy who can’t talk all that well (i.e., Emmitt Smith) to a former player who looks and sounds good as the horsesh-t is flowing from his mouth.

So, ESPN, we rescind our request that you fire Emmitt.  But we beg you to fire Schlereth.  Now.