Tom Brady: Union Demands Goodell ‘Exonerate’ Patriots QB, NFL Won’t Tighten Pre-Game Football Checks

Tom Brady, the superstar New England Patriots quarterback suspended for four games in the “Deflategate” scandal, must be completely “exonerated” by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the NFL Players Association chief said Wednesday. If Goodell fails to clear Brady of all accusations that he was involved in illegally deflating footballs, the union will “take the next step, whatever that next step might be,” NFLPA President Eric Winston said.

The demand — which few if any football experts expect that Goodell will meet — came a day after the NFL made clear that the 2015 season will see no significant changes to the procedure by which officials handle and inspect footballs before each game.

Goodell has stated from the earliest stages of the Deflategate affair in January that the central issue of the scandal was the “integrity of the game,” integrity that may have been violated by deliberate deflation of the footballs, allegedly by Patriots employees.

And yet the NFL, it now appears, will now do absolutely nothing to ensure that the “integrity” of those footballs is protected going forward into next season.

While the move, or non-move, appears perplexing, the most confusing element of the scandal in Winston’s eyes is simply the seeming snail’s pace at which the NFL has moved throughout — going back to January 18 when the Patriots defeated the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship Game, a victory followed only hours later by the first public allegations of deflated footballs.

“It’s not even worth trying to guess what’s going on because it doesn’t seem like all the time that they know what’s going on,” Winston told NBC’s Pro Football Talk Live on Wednesday, referring to the NFL officials overseeing the Deflategate process.

“Why it takes over a month, and why it took six months to get to that point before that, and the constant feet-dragging on not just Tom’s issue but all the issues is, to me, just seems a bit ridiculous and doesn’t serve the players very well. But that’s where we’re at now and we’re just going to have to continue to keep advocating for our players,” Winston said.

On June 23, Brady presented his case directly to Goodell at a hearing at which the Patriots future Hall of Famer appealed his four-game ban. But a month has now passed with no decision from Goodell — more than six months since that fateful AFC Championship Game — and Goodell this week offered nothing except to say that there is “no timeline” for when a decision could be issued.

In fact, veteran NFL reporter Peter King wrote this week that some rumblings within the NFL indicate that the decision may not come down for another year.

While the possibility of a delay that lengthy seems hard to fathom, some reports say that Goodell may have made his decision not to “exonerate” Tom Brady, but the process is now in the hands of lawyers, not Goodell, as the NFL attempts to defend itself against an inevitable lawsuit by Brady and the NFLPA.

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