Oh the memories.
When the teams opened the next season on Monday Night Football, late in the first half of a 7-7 game, Patriots fullback Marc Edwards later admitted that Tom Brady told the offensive huddle “We have their signs.” The Patriots scored on five of their next seven possessions to turn a competitive game into a 30-14 rout at Gillette Stadium.
The next time the two teams faced off in 2004, the defending champion Patriots were riding an NFL record 21-consecutive game winning streak. But it was a different Steelers team featuring Ben Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu and Dick LeBeau that cruised to a 34-20 win to put an convincing end to their streak. However, it enabled the Patriots to illegally tape the Steelers from the sideline and armed with that advantage, leveraged it to steal a second AFC Championship later that season.
Hines Ward, per CBS Sports:"They were calling our stuff out. They knew, especially that first championship game here at Heinz Field [in 2002]. They knew a lot of our calls. There's no question some of their players were calling out some of our stuff."
Joey Porter, per NFL Live:
"I got cheated. You cannot sit up there and honestly tell me if it wasn't working, why was he doing it so much? I could be sitting up here with three rings. They cheated, there should be an asterisk."
Kordell Stewart, per the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
“For some reason, they knew every single thing we were doing. They had the perfect defense from a blitz standpoint, everything we were trying to do.”
Belichick and a few others, they found a library of scouting material containing videotapes of opponents' signals, with detailed notes matching signals to plays for many teams going back seven seasons. Among them were handwritten diagrams of the defensive signals of the Pittsburgh Steelers, including the notes used in the January 2002 AFC Championship Game won by the Patriots 24-17.”
