Former New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said he didn’t truly understand what was happening in the wake of accusations he had deflated footballs, a scandal which he initially laughed off.
But those accusations — and the scandal — escalated enormously in the months that followed into Deflategate. The now-Buccaneers quarterback explained what was going through his mind during the first few days of the ball-deflating controversy.
“I think the next morning is when I heard about it,” Brady says, with his interview spliced up with video clips from his infamous Deflategate news conference. “… I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know what they were talking about, so I kind of just laughed it off. … I think everyone was trying to figure out exactly what was happening, what was — obviously what we were being accused of doing. … I just remember walking in (to a press conference), and there was different cameras there than ever before. This was not a football story anymore. … When you’re being accused of something, first of all, you’re trying to figure out exactly what happened yourself.”
As he came to digest the accusations, Brady actually had familiar feelings.
“We’d accomplished so much as a team, and here we are talking about something that we didn’t know much about at the time,” Brady said. “All it is is negativity and people trying to take us down, and I think that part was familiar.”
The NFL ultimately issued a four-game suspension for Brady and though he attempted an appeal in court, he served the suspension. In the Super Bowl immediately after the initial accusations, Brady and the Patriots defeated the Seattle Seahawks. Then in the Super Bowl following the suspension, Brady and the Patriots defeated the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl.
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