Patriots coach Bill Belichick talks with reporters Wednesday at Gillette Stadium.

AP / Michael Dwyer

Chuck Knox, a head coach in the NFL for 22 years, called it “a whole lot about nothing.”

Paul Spicer, a defensive end for the Jaguars, called for a $2-million fine, the loss of second- and third-round draft choices, and for the offenders to be banned from participating in the playoffs.

We’ll call those the extremes in the case of The People — in this case, the National Football League and the American sporting public — vs. Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots. When deciding on punishment, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell came down far closer to Spicer’s position than Knox’s. On the surface, it resolves the question that no one seemed to be able to get their arms around this week: What, exactly, did the Patriots do last Sunday? The answer: Something pretty serious.

But in what way?

Was it in whatever competitive edge they gleaned from having video assistant Matt Estrella tape the Jets’ defensive coaches flashing signals on the sidelines? There’s obviously something to be gained; the Patriots wouldn’t have done it otherwise. But what?

“You have to wonder how much all this really would help,” Lions general manager Matt Millen told SI.com’s Paul Zimmerman. “If you’ve done your film study, you should have a pretty good idea, from the personnel on the field and the tendencies they’ve shown, what [defense the other team is] going to be in.”

“New England realistically may have been able to catch one or two plays from doing that and they could’ve had somebody in the press box getting the same information,” former Atlanta Falcons general manager Ken Herock told ESPN.com’s Jeffri Chadiha. “And what you’re actually talking about is one or two plays out of about 60 snaps a game. That really isn’t a great advantage.”

It sounds like a lot of risk for very little reward. Especially since, as Chadiha quoted one AFC general manager, “the bottom line is that it’s illegal.”

To quote a popular Internet phrase, we have bingo.

It’s illegal. It’s illegal and the Patriots did it anyway. And they did it even though they allegedly got caught with their hands in this very same cookie jar — with this very same video assistant — last November in Green Bay.

“We all get the same memos from the league each season telling us what we can’t do,” said that AFC general manager. The Pats chose to ignore it, again . . . and that, we can assume, is why their wrists are being bludgeoned with an anvil instead of slapped with a feather, which would seem to be a more appropriate response from Goodell for this particular crime.

After all, from all the comments around the country in the last few days, it’s clear that — in strict football terms — Knox is right. Yes, it’s nice to know what the other team is doing. Yes, it can be helpful. No, from everything we’ve heard, it’s not really going to tip the balance of a game in any significant way. One insider said it was nothing more than a nuisance, easily thwarted by having multiple coaches flashing phony signals but just one more (meaningless) element that had to be accounted for in game planning.

But “the bottom line is that it’s illegal.”

And the disconcerting theme that kept recurring in accounts from across the country is that most NFL teams consider this — cheating, bending (and sometimes breaking) the rules, acting as though the NFL policies don’t apply to them — to be the Patriots’ M.O. Coaches such as the Jaguars’ Jack Del Rio, the Lions’ Rod Marinelli and the Bengals’ Marvin Lewis swapped stories of mysterious equipment breakdowns in Foxboro. Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward talked of how the Pats seemingly knew all his team’s plays in the AFC Championship game several years ago. When the Bucs beat the Pats in the 2000 season opener, one Tampa Bay assistant said he was told by a Pats’ assistant that his team’s victory was all the more impressive because “we knew what you were going to do on every play.”

Some of it is jealousy, to be sure; it’s a natural response to any team that’s won as often as the Patriots have over the last six years. But Goodell’s penalty — as stern as anything that’s ever been handed down by a NFL commissioner — suddenly lends credence to stories that, just last week, would have been dismissed as sour grapes.

How owner Robert Kraft will respond to this is an interesting question. Kraft and his family have carefully molded the team’s squeaky-clean image and that image — coming on the heels of the Rodney Harrison suspension — is now shattered. Additionally, Kraft has become one of the NFL’s top powerbrokers and he can’t be happy about how his team is being perceived in the league’s boardrooms.

Former colleague Tom Curran, now the national football writer at NBCSports.com, noted that Belichick included “ownership” in his statement of apology Wednesday, which “acknowledges there’s probably a pretty [angry] owner somewhere in Foxboro.”

He’s not any happier today, you can be sure. Of course, whether he’s mad because the Pats broke the rules or because they got caught . . . that’s another question we can’t really answer.

The only person who can really shed light on this is Belichick, and we know he won’t. As our own Jim Donaldson wrote yesterday morning, Belichick can be “insightful, informative and even enjoyable” on topics he enjoys discussing, but is “boring and, on occasion, boorish” in most of his dealings with the media. He’ll have to address the issue again today — indeed, he promised he would when the league ruling came down — but if you’re expecting more than his usual monotone clichÉs, designed to say and reveal nothing, you’re probably expecting too much. This, after all, is a topic we can be sure Bill Belichick does not enjoy discussing,

In the past, however, Belichick and the Patriots have always been able to dictate the terms of the public discourse. Their incredible on-field success has given them that luxury.

It’s a luxury that, thanks to their own behavior, they no longer have.

amartone@projo.com