The New England Patriots are one of the most hated teams in all of sports and, unfortunately, it may be for good reason.

Quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots host quarterback Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys in a Week 12 matchup on Sunday, Nov. 24, 2019 (11/24/19) at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. Nov 16, 2018 In a new book, Bill Parcells says he approached Bill Walsh before their divisional-round game in 1987 and told him he knew the 49ers sabotaged their own staff's headsets during their first series. The biggest area of concern was the interior, an area the Cowboys routinely ignored during the Jason Garrett era. The first domino to fall came in March when the Cowboys signed veteran Gerald.

Despite having one of the winningest coaches of all time in Bill Belichick and the All-American champion in Tom Brady, there's still a dark cloud that's been surrounding the franchise for over the past decade.

1. The best game on Sunday was definitely Cowboys vs Packers, and even though Green Bay won, one fan exposed the NFL when he posted a video of a lineman moving a first down marker further back to.
2. If the Cowboys were cheating they wouldn’t have come into game at 6-5. It’s not to say the Cowboys “were” cheating, but lots of bad teams have cheated in the past.
3. A fan watching last night’s game against the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints on television screenshotted a moment in the game where a Dallas Cowboys staffer was holding a cell phone. The worst thing is that the staffer can be seen right behind Saints head coach, and offensive playcaller, Sean Payton.
4. Spygate was an incident during the National Football League's (NFL) 2007 season, when the New England Patriots were disciplined by the league for videotaping New York Jets' defensive coaches' signals from an unauthorized location during a September 9, 2007 game.

It was reported this morning that the NFL is now investigating if the Pats actually deflated balls before the AFC Championship game against the Colts yesterday, and if these dirty tactics are true, it just reminds everyone of that dirty C-word: cheating.

Yes, New England has a dirty reputation of doing literally whatever it takes to win, but how much longer will they be allowed to get away with tactics like this?

And what will it take for the NFL to finally do something about it? The full history of their lack of integrity tells us everything we need to know.

2002: Marshall Faulk claims Patriots cheated Rams out of Super Bowl win

Tom Brady won his first championship with the Patriots at Super Bowl XXXVI against the Rams, and Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk was the first person ever to call out Belichick for having just a little too much intel ahead of the game. He said,

I understand Bill is a great coach. But No. 13 [Kurt Warner] will tell you. Mike Martz will tell you. We had some plays in the red zone that we hadn't ran.And a couple of plays on third down that we walked through also. And they created a check for it. It's just little things like that.It's either the best coaching in the world when you come up with situations that you had never seen before. Or you'd seen it and knew what to do.

2004: James Harrison calls out the Patriots for more signal stealing

More claims of the Patriots having impossible information about the opposing team's game plans came in 2004 via Steelers linebacker James Harrison.

Cheating During Cowboys Game Yesterday

He said,

I should have another ring. We were the best team in football in 2004, but the Patriots, who we beat during the regular season, stole our signals and picked up 90 percent of our blitzes [in the AFC title game].They got busted for it later, but hey, they're Goodell's boys, so he slapped 'em $500,000 and burned the tapes. Was he going to rescind their Super Bowls? Man, hell no!

2007: The videotaping controversy known as 'Spygate' rocks the NFL

After multiple accusations of spying on teams, proof of this reality came to light in 2007 when the league finally disciplined the Patriots for recording the Jets' practices.

Defensive signals, formations and different personnel strategies were stolen and the Patriots were finally punished... Sort of.

The Patriots were stripped of their first-round draft pick the following year and fined $250,000.

Bill Belichick was fined $500,000, but the team still got their shot to play in the Super Bowl.

Of course, that was the year the Giants spoiled their perfect season, proving karma is a bitch.

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2015: Legendary coach Don Shula calls out Bill Belichick

The former Miami Dolphins coaching legend, who went head-to-head with Belichick, had a hilarious nickname for the Pats coach.

During an interview, he said,

The embers of competition have cooled some. But they're still warm, if you care to see them. The coach can still can bring it when he wants, like when a forgotten scab is picked with the mention of the current king, New England's Bill Belichick. 'Beli-cheat?

2015: Used illegal plays against Baltimore in divisional playoff game.

The Patriots came back to beat the Baltimore Ravens in the 2015 AFC divisional playoff game after falling down 14 points.

However, with the use of illegal plays and formations that even fooled the refs, they came back to stay in the title hunt, beating their foes 35-31.

Ravens coach John Harbaugh immediately called out the Pats for something that should've never happened. He claimed,

It was clearly deception. That's why I had to take the penalty, to get their attention so they would understand what was going on because [the Ravens' defense] didn't understand what was going on.That's why guys were open, because we didn't ID where the eligible receivers were at. The league will look at that type of thing, and I'm sure that they'll make some adjustments and things like that.

2015: Accused of deflating balls during AFC Championship game against Indianapolis

Just one game later, the Patriots were accused of even more cheating, and allegedly deflating balls in the AFC Championship game is as low as it gets.

Granted, the Colts were completely outmatched and New England was the better team, but this cheap tactic is all but confirmed, and, according to Bob Kravitz, the team is awaiting league punishment.

Told if a league investigation confirms deflated footballs it will result in lost draft picks. Stay tuned.— Bob Kravitz (@bkravitz) January 19, 2015

According to Kravitz, balls that are deflated are easier to throw and catch. He said,

I initially thought a softer ball would be tougher to throw, but people who understand physics have since told me it would be easier to throw and catch. Naturally, Boston fans went nuts on me, calling me every conceivable name.Nobody is suggesting the footballs had any appreciable impact on the game; it was a butt-whooping.But if the league believes the balls were deflated, expect the Pats to be fined or be forced to forfeit draft picks. Or both. What a day. And it's gonna get longer.

News broke last week that despite a state-sponsored doping scheme, the Russian delegation would not be wholly disqualified from the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Instead, individual athletes’ fates are being assessed by their respective sporting federations. Those without evidence of doping, it seems, will be able to compete – a far more lenient response from the International Olympic Committee than many might have expected. Moreover it’s more lenient than the IOC’s historical counterpart, the ancient Greek Olympic Council, likely would have handed down.

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Ancient Olympians didn’t have performance-enhancing drugs at their disposal, but according to those who know the era best, if the ancient Greeks could have doped, a number of athletes definitely would have. “We only know of a small number of examples of cheating but it was probably fairly common,” says David Gilman Romano, a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona. And yet the athletes had competing interests. “Law, oaths, rules, vigilant officials, tradition, the fear of flogging, the religious setting of the games, a personal sense of honor – all these contributed to keep Greek athletic contests clean,” wrote Clarence A. Forbes, a professor of Classics at Ohio State University, in 1952. “And most of the thousands of contests over the centuries were clean.”

That said, ancient Greeks proved to be creative in their competitiveness. Some attempted to jinx athletes to prevent their success. According to Romano, “curse tablets could be found in athletic contexts. For instance, strips of lead were inscribed with the curse, then folded up and placed in the floor at a critical part of the athletic facility.”

Judging from the writings of the second-century A.D. traveler named Pausanias, however, most cheating in the ancient Olympics was related to bribery or foul play. Not coincidentally, the mythological basis of the Olympic games involves both, according to Romano’s writing. The figure thought to have founded the Olympic Games, Pelops, did so as a celebration of his marriage and chariot victory over the wealthy king Oinomaos, spoils he only gained after bribing the king’s charioteer to sabotage the royal’s ride. The first Games are said to have been held in 776 B.C., though archeological evidence suggest they may have begun centuries earlier.

References to legendary instances of cheating have survived the centuries. A scene of a wrestler attempting to gouge the eyes of an opponent and bite him simultaneously, with an official poised to hit the double-offender with a stick or a rod, graces the side of a cup from roughly 490 B.C. In Greece today, pedestals that once held great statues still line pathways that led to ancient stadiums. But these were not statues that heralded athletic feats, rather they served as reminders of athletes and coaches who cheated. According to Patrick Hunt, a professor of archaeology at Stanford University, these monuments were funded by levies placed on athletes or on the city-states themselves by the ancient Olympic Council.

In Pausanias’ account, which is analyzed and translated in Forbes’ article, there were three main methods of dishonesty:

There are several stories of city-states trying to bribe top athletes to lie and claim that city-state as their own (a practice that continues in some form today, as the story of Dominica’s imported ski team from 2014 proves). When one athlete ran for Syracuse instead of his home city-state of Croton, the city of Croton tore down a statue of him and “seized his house for use as a public jail,” writes Forbes.

Then there was direct bribery between athletes or between those close to the athletes to influence the results. In 388 B.C., during the 98th Olympics, a boxer named Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three of his opponents to let him win. All four men were heavily fined, and up went six bronze statues of Zeus, four of which had inscriptions about the scandal and a warning to future athletes.

Finally, there were “fouls and forbidden tricks,” as Forbes refers to them. He references a fragment of a satirical play found, in which a group of performers claim to be comprised of athletes “skilled in wrestling, horse-racing, running, boxing, biting, and testicle-twisting.” Athletes were beaten with rods or flogged for fouling another player, for cheating to get an advantage, like starting early in a footrace, and for attempting to game the system that determined match-ups and byes.

And, it turns out, spectators did some cheating of their own, too. “One woman dressed as a man to see her son perform,” says Patrick Hunt. “She was caught and penalized.” Judges even ran into trouble at times. Forbes makes note of an instance in which officials voted to crown a member of their own city-state, an obvious conflict of interests. The judges were fined, but their decision was upheld. Once again, the modern Olympics haven’t been much different, for those who remember the 2002 Winter Games when a French judge gave Russian skaters high marks, allegedly in exchange for a Russian judge reciprocating for French ice dancers.

Entire city-states could get into trouble as well. In 420 B.C., according to Pausanias, Sparta was banned from the Olympics for violating a peace treaty, but one of their athletes entered the chariot race pretending to represent Thebes. He won, and in his elation, revealed who his true charioteer was. He was flogged and the victory was ultimately recorded as going to Thebes, with no mention of his name, which could be seen as an additional punishment (some records of Olympic victories have been discovered).

The modern events and global inclusivity of today’s Olympics may suggest how far we’ve come since ancient times, but scandals like the one playing out in Russia this summer remind us of what Patrick Hunt calls human nature: “We want an edge. Russian athletes may be banned from Brazil because of cheating, but people have always been looking for performance enhancing tricks.”