When Joey Porter isn’t sending his dogs out to chew on toy horses, he’s sounding off on SpyGate.

Porter played on the Steelers team that lost to the Patriots in the 2001 AFC Championship, and he may still be a little bitter.

Porter’s remarks, from the SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINAL:

“They cheated,” Porter said during a telephone interview on ESPN’s NFL Live Friday. “I feel like there should be an asterisk on it, just because [disgraced track star] Marion Jones, she gets caught, they take the gold medals back. Obviously, they got caught.”

Porter couldn’t understand why the league destroyed some of the evidence turned over by the Patriots during the NFL investigation.

“If it wasn’t that bad, why would you destroy the evidence?” Porter said. “If Tom Brady wasn’t getting help out of it, then why would you do it every week? And everyone wants to wonder how these guys just went from zero to 60 overnight.”

By “zero to 60,” he may be referring to Bill Belichick’s horrible tenure as the head man in Cleveland, or the Pats’ 5-11 record in 2000, or maybe the fact that they finally took Drew Bledsoe off the field when their dynasty started to sprout legs. Either way, he’s representing a faction of opinion that we had yet to hear from here: players that stood to lose from the Patriots’ cheating ways.

The Marion Jones example may be a reach–maybe. But until Belichick doles out exactly what he gained while he cheated, the speculation will be left to Porter and others, and it’s a safe assumption that the shadow cast by SpyGate will hang over everything that team has accomplished until that happens. Jones’ career was essentially scrubbed from the record books. Belichick was fined. Perhaps the proper retribution lies somewhere in between.