New England Patriots Targeted By NFL: Deflategate Was Excuse To Discredit Team, Report Says

The New England Patriots were specifically singled out by the NFL, which was looking for some way to damage the team’s reputation — with the so-called Deflategate scandal proving the perfect excuse, according to inside NFL sources who spoke to the sports site Bleacher Report for a Friday article.

In fact, according to the Bleacher Report story, when the Deflategate report was issued on Wednesday, one NFL executive gleefully exclaimed, “The league finally got those motherf*****s!”

The report concluded that it was “more probable than not” that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was “generally aware” of “inappropriate activities” by two Patriots locker room attendants that possibly involved letting air out of footballs.

The Patriots during the past 15 years — the time period when Brady has been the quarterback and Bill Belichick the coach — have been perceived by other NFL organizations as “the best cheaters” in the NFL, a league where every team cheats, according to Bleacher Report NFL correspondent Mike Freeman,

During that period, the Patriots have also enjoyed unprecedented success, appearing in six Super Bowls and winning four, as well as appearing in three additional AFC Conference Championship games while making the NFL playoffs in all but two of those 15 seasons — with Brady missing the season due to injury in one of those non-playoff years.

“Once the Indianapolis Colts complained to the league that they thought the Patriots were illegally deflating footballs, this belief by Indianapolis is what led to it originally investigating the footballs. Then, an amazing thing happened: The Colts became a proxy for teams that believed the Patriots had used deflated footballs against them,” Freeman wrote.

Mike Florio, of the NBC-owned Pro Football Talk site, also said that the Deflategate operation was a “sting” designed specifically to take down the Patriots, presumably to appease other NFL teams.

Florio pointed out that, according to the Deflategate report, during January’s AFC Championship game against the Colts — the game in which the Patriots were accused of playing with deflated footballs — head referee Walt Anderson somehow lost the game balls just moments before the game was set to begin.

It was the first time in his 19-year career that Anderson had ever misplaced the footballs.

“When he finds the footballs, knowing there is a concern about possible tampering with the air pressure in the footballs, he [should] order that the balls be taken back to the officials locker room and tested then,” Florio said in a radio interview Thursday. “They don’t do that. That’s what he should have done. It’s amazing to me that wasn’t done.”

Florio went on to say that the only explanation for why the referee would fail to re-inspect the balls was that the NFL was deliberately setting up the Patriots.

“So was this about the integrity of the game, or was this about catching the Patriots? That evidence there tells me it was about catching the Patriots,” Florio said.

A halftime inspection of the footballs showed that three of the four footballs used by Colts quarterback Andrew Luck were also underinflated.

Eleven New England Patriots footballs were checked by two officials at halftime, with each official getting different results. In 10 of the 11 readings, results obtained by alternate referee Clete Blakeman were lower than those recorded by fellow official Dyrol Prioleau.

Clete Blakeman is familiar to New England Patriots fans as the referee who revoked a pass interference call in a 2013 Monday Night Football game against the Carolina Panthers, effectively awarding the game to the Patriots’ opponents.

[Image: Christian Petersen/Getty Images]