I think all these little "bending the rule things" like this are blown way out of proportion, reason being I would bet over he years the majority of teams all did little things like deflating balls or putting a little stick em on hands. Back in Jerry Rice era the gloves were no where near as sticky as the modern day Nike gloves of today. Back then Newman made the 1st sticky kind of WR glove that I can remember and wearing them was a night and day difference. I remember back in the 1980 super bowl between the Eagles and Raiders stick em was legal and players like Lester Hayes would cake his hands in that stuff you can even see in pictures most of the Raider players had orange stick em all over their uniforms, eventually they banned stick em