AP

The battle lines were drawn clearly on Friday. After Boomer Esiason said during Thursday night’s Westwood One broadcast of the Dolphins-Patriots game (and repeated on WFAN the next morning) that the Jets had asked the league to sweep its locker room at Gillette Stadium last Sunday for bugs, the league said that the Jets made no such request.

Asked Friday by reporters about the “alleged locker room sweep” on Sunday, Jets coach Todd Bowles said, “I know nothing about it.”

The sweep, which the league has not confirmed on the record, was attributed to a random process. As one source with knowledge of the league’s procedures tells PFT, the league conducts five or six such random electronic audits per year.

But a source with knowledge of the communications occurring during the sweep for bugs tells PFT that the league told Patriots personnel that the sweep was happening not as part of a random process but at the request of “a team.”

The NFL didn’t say which team; in theory, it could have been the Colts. But the Patriots interpreted the message to mean that it was the Jets.

Both Esiason and the Boston Herald report that the Jets did indeed request the sweep. While the Jets still have not commented on the matter, the fact that Jets security chief Robert Mastroddi instigated a misplaced interrogation of Kraft Sports employees who were present on the Patriots sideline while wearing Patriots gear and headsets speaks to a level of paranoia that would easily prompt the Jets to ask for a sweep of the locker room for bugs — especially in light of the Sports Illustrated report from last month that multiple teams have suspected bugging of their locker rooms in New England.