There are coaches who chase the spotlight, and then there’s Bill Belichick – a man who has shown about as much patience for the media as he has sleeves on a sweatshirt in his 20 seasons with the New England Patriots. Nowhere does he make his contempt for the Fourth Estate plainer than in his brooding news conferences, a trademark to rival his six championships rings and an exercise he would avoid altogether if the league didn’t force him to do it.

No matter how pro forma the questions – be they about personnel or strategy, be it in victory or defeat – Belichick, in a mumbling tone, defaults to responses that are by turns clipped, cagey and cliché. Throughout he stands before his curious audience defiant, in much the same way a POW might before an enemy firing squad. All that’s missing is the blindfold over his narrow-eyed stare and the cigarette dangling from his pursed lips. Fresh cheating allegations against the Patriots figure to make the cranky coach even more contemptuous of the beleaguered men and women who cover him.

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And yet: every now and again, Belichick will drop his guard. He’ll be thoughtful, flattering, introspective – he’ll even crack jokes! He’ll remind the world that there is indeed a real, beating heart inside this cyborg of a football savant. In fact, one would be hard pressed to remember a time when the coach has put himself out there to the extent that he has this season. In late November the NFL Network debuted the NFL 100 All-Time Team – an hourlong, six-part reveal-and-react series in which Belichick features prominently as a voting panelist, on-air pundit and shoo-in finalist. On Tuesday HBO dropped Belichick & Saban: The Art of Coaching, a 74-minute meeting of the minds that provides the most comprehensive answer to a question that’s burned ever since a crimson-trimmed Belichick was spotted kibitzing with Alabama’s Nick Saban at the school’s pro day back in March: When the NFL’s best coach gets together with the best coach in college football, what do they talk about?

Turns out, they stick to football. In the HBO series they go deep on everything from old school versus new school film study habits (Saban: “If you’re really smart on computers and all that, you may not know the first thing about coaching a football player or technique, but you can rise in the [coaching] world…”); to helping assistants land jobs as head coaches only for them to turn around and try hiring away former co-workers (Belichick: “When they try to tear down our program, that’s kinda where I feel like the line gets crossed…”); to the rather stunning truth that Belichick actually calls Saban to learn more about Bama pro prospects ahead of the draft (Saban: “But then there’s another 30 teams that I never hear from…”).

On the NFL Network show Belichick is even more in his element, breaking down pre–helmet era game tape, heaping praise on his prized pupil (the Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor) and fawning over one of his greatest nemeses (the Hall of Fame safety Ed Reed). In frame after frame Belichick comes across as something more than a sideline-prowling warlock with a severe case of lockjaw. He comes across as engaging, likable – a natural. And it’s no coincidence that this view of Belichick – the kinder, gentler side he reserves for immediate family, close friends and select members of his particular football tribe – comes courtesy of the NFL’s media organ (its Films division produced the HBO doc), maybe the only outlet Belichick trusts and definitely the only outlet with the most vested interest in godding up the Pats coach on the occasion of the league’s centennial. And for a minute there this new media creature – Bill Belichick, the camera darling – was winning the charm offensive.

But then came Monday’s bombshell that the NFL was investigating the Patriots after a team employee was caught videotaping the Cincinnati Bengals’ sideline signals during the team’s loss to the Browns – news that first-year Bengals coach Zac Taylor confirmed in his press conference. In a subsequent statement the Patriots accepted “full responsibility” for the incident (which they blamed on a credentialing mix-up related to an in-house produced web series about an advance scout), while Belichick went on radio to denied any involvement and didn’t take any further questions about the subject in his press conference on Friday. (This is after Belichick pretty much stuck to the script in his Wednesday presser.)

Still: that the defending Super Bowl champion would deign to peep on the franchise most likely to be picking first in the draft in April is an idea that becomes considerably less preposterous in the fullness of Spygate, the 2007 video espionage scandal that resulted in separate six-figure fines for New England and Belichick and the loss of a first-round round draft pick. Even more suspicious is the way the Patriots were caught this time – with a lone videographer whose lens had been trained on the Cincinnati sideline for at least a quarter, according to ESPN’s Dianna Russini.

When cornered by Bengals security and relieved of his reel, the videographer reportedly outed himself as an employee of owner Robert Kraft (not the team) and “asked if they could just delete the footage and it all be forgotten”, per Russini’s sources. His peaceful surrender might’ve been easier to accept if it didn’t immediately recall a 2015 ESPN deep dive by Don Van Natta Jr and Seth Wickersham in which another Patriots videographer named Matt Walsh, a star witness in the Spygate case, told league investigators that, among other things, spy videographers were instructed “to wear credentials that said (…) Kraft Productions” and, if caught by NFL security, “tell them you’re filming (…) footage for a team show”.

That the Bill Belichick-coached Patriots would use the media as its get-out-of-jail-free card might prove an irony too rich for some. That these same Patriots would be accused of spying again more than a decade after they were first caught and punished is a reality that Roger Goodell simply cannot ignore. However, that’s not to say there’s much chance of the commissioner coming down near as hard on Patriots as the NCAA might if one of its schools’ coaches were caught treating a hungry player to a meal, vacating wins and taking back trophies and imposing bans and forcing disgraced resignations and whatnot – even after the Bengals beat the league to the smoking gun. How could Goodell after rushing to judgement in the non-scandal scandal that was Deflategate, and after ordering the destruction of the Spygate tapes to bring a pat end to that affair?

This is the league’s 100th birthday, after all, and Belichick arguably its greatest ever coach. Never mind that no matter how great the victories or the efforts to recast himself as America’s friendly neighborhood coaching great, it seems, Belichick – who, in the HBO doc, describes himself as “a guy who solves problems” – will never be able to live down the cheating allegations that trail in his shadow. When it comes to keeping up appearances in this league, hey, as the Hoody himself is wont to mutter: It is what it is.