New England Patriots

Ex-Jets head coach Eric Mangini says he regrets starting 'Spygate'

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:07 p.m. ET

Brett Smiley

It wasn't worth it.

10 years after Eric Mangini took the New York Jets head coach job and nine years since "Spygate" shifted the public's perception of the New England Patriots, the coach known at one time as "Mangenius" wishes the -gate had never occurred, or at least not in the manner it did.

In a recent interview with the New York Post's Brian Costello, Mangini, who tipped Jets security that the Patriots might be filming New York's defensive signals from their sideline during a September 2007 contest at the Meadowlands, explained why he regrets the whole incident.

“Spygate is a big regret,” Mangini said. “It wasn’t supposed to go down the way it went down. There was no great value in what they were doing. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth it to me personally. It wasn’t worth it to the relationship.”

Mangini says "personally" because the former Patriots coach had close relationships with Patriots owner Robert Kraft and head coach Bill Belichick. Once the league caught wind of the matter, it seized the Patriots' videotapes and later destroyed them. Later the NFL fined the Patriots and Belichick a total of $750,000 and docked them their 2008 first-round draft pick.

A lot of people call that justice but for Mangini at least, the personal ramifications have caused him to see it differently.

“I cared about him,” Mangini said of Belichick. “I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt the Patriots. They were a huge part of my life, too, and the Kraft family. The Krafts were always great to me. It wasn’t like I was thinking I really want to get these guys. My thought was I don’t want to put my team at a competitive disadvantage, no matter how small.”