Brady Exonerated But Not Innocent

On Thursday, September 10th 2015 Tom Brady and the New England Patriots geared up for opening night of the 2015 NFL season, and an eventual 28-21 victory over the Pittsburg Steelers. The night seemed nothing out of the ordinary for New England as the Patriots led nearly the entire way, with Brady tossing four touchdown passes, but the weeks and months leading up to this seemingly routine Patriots victory were not quite as normal for Brady, the Patriots and all of football.

Rewind eight months earlier to January 18th 2015: it’s halftime of the AFC Championship game and the Patriots have a ten-point lead on the Indianapolis Colts as Brady vies for his sixth trip to the Super Bowl, the most ever for a starting quarterback. At this point in the game, the Colts suggest to the referees that the Patriots footballs are underinflated relative to the Colts’ footballs. A report was compiled by renowned criminal attorney Theodore V. Wells Jr. and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, in combination with the NFL to investigate any potential wrongdoing by Brady and the Patriots regarding the deflation of footballs during the AFC Championship game. It concluded that all eleven of the Patriots game balls tested measured below the minimum pressure level of 12.5 pounds per square inch (PSI), while the four Colts balls that were tested measured within the legal 12.5 to 13.5 PSI limit allowed by the NFL.

There is no valid reason why each team has its own set of footballs, but the Wells report concluded that it was “more probable than not that Brady was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of [patriots equipment managers] involving the release of air from Patriots game balls.”

Less than a week later on May 11th, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Brady for the first four games of the season. He slapped the Patriots with a $1 million fine and forfeiture of two future draft picks, citing the Wells Report, and Brady’s lack of cooperation in the investigation. This set up the national sports media with a summer of the scandalous sustenance they require. While many claim that media coverage during the NFL offseason can be overdone and boring, this was truly a new type of scandal; the NFL had allegedly just caught the quarterback of the Super Bowl Champion blatantly cheating. Brady was accused of advising his equipment managers to release air out of the game balls in order to gain a competitive advantage, and then not turning over his phone to the NFL.

Most people’s problem with Brady’s suspension was that the Patriots had already won the Super Bowl, and they obviously weren’t going to replay the AFC championship, the game in which Brady had apparently cheated.

This was not the Patriots first encounter with the law enforcement arm of the NFL. In 2007, in what was referred to as Spygate, the Patriots were caught illegally filming practices of opposing teams in order to gain a competitive advantage. The Patriots had now seemingly committed two major crimes, which validated the beliefs of those who believed the Patriots needed to cheat in order to win.

Whether you love the Patriots or hate them, here are the facts: since Tom Brady became the starting quarterback of the Patriots in 2001, they have won four Super Bowls, tying Brady with Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw as the only quarterbacks to do so. In a game that is measured by results, Brady seemed to have some of the best, but there is a dark cloud over those who want to believe Tom Brady is the best quarterback of all-time. While federal judge Richard Berman exonerated Brady and erased his suspension after Brady appealed, it is not what some want to hear.

Judge Berman ruled that commissioner Roger Goodell was “dispensing his own brand of industrial justice,” by suspending Brady, and did not rule that Brady was innocent in Deflategate. If Brady was innocent, why did he smash his phone that contained text messages to his equipment managers? Why wasn’t he cooperative at all? These questions make Brady look guilty.

The Patriots won their first three Super Bowls in quick succession in 2001, 2003 & 2004, then lost to the New York Giants in 2007 and 2012, before finally winning the title again in 2015. For those keeping score at home, those first three titles occurred when the Patriots were filming other teams’ practices, and the fourth occurred under the Deflategate scandal, for which Brady was eventually exonerated, but not for the reasons Brady fans would like to believe.