“To suggest that I destroyed a phone to avoid giving the NFL information it requested is completely wrong”, Brady said in his statement.
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“Most importantly, I have never written, texted, emailed to anybody at anytime, anything related to football air pressure before this issue was raised at the AFC Championship game in January”. The players union has vowed to appeal the decision.
While Brady said he respects Goodell’s authority, he said the commissioner needs to honor the league’s collective-bargaining agreement.
Wells said the scheme to deflate the footballs was carried out by two Patriots employees. “I think you read what he said and that’s what we’re going to do”.
Special teamer Matthew Slater said Patriots players support Brady.
The Patriots defeated the Colts 45-7 on their way to winning the Super Bowl.
At Tom Brady’s first press conference to discuss the rumblings of what would become “Deflategate”, he put on his million-dollar smile, his charm and repeated the word “balls” enough to make us all laugh, squirm in our seat and forget for a second that he cheated in a playoff game he could have won without any extra help.
“It’s been well documented in the past two years that this commissioner’s decisions on discipline have been quite erratic”, Yee said.
“We’re going to take it day to day, just like we always do”, he said.
The NFL Players Association and the New England Patriots quarterback have filed a federal lawsuit to remove Brady’s four-game suspension for his role in the “Deflategate” scandal. But the NFL already had filed papers Tuesday in New York, moments after announcing that Commissioner Roger Goodell upheld the suspension for Bradys involvement in the use of underinflated footballs in the AFC championship game.
Brady broke his silence in a 507-word Facebook post earlier Wednesday. The move to consolidate the lawsuits involving Brady in New York is seen as an initial victory for the NFL in that the league was successful in choosing the jurisdiction to hear the arguments.
The hope is it lands before U.S. District Judge David S. Doty, who in February vacated the arbitration award issued by the appeals officer Goodell designated, Harold Henderson, and thus is “in the best position to determine to what degree his decision in Peterson already requires this discipline be thrown out for lack of notice”, Kessler said.
What Goodell did not say was how he knew that Brady’s phone contained “10,000” text messages – except in a single footnote, in which he acknowledged that the source of that figure was Brady himself. “In fact, the NFL collectively bargained over the punishments (fines, not suspensions) for alleged equipment tampering by players-including those designed to gain a competitive advantage-and was not free to disregard that CBA bargain and subject Brady to other standards, policies, and penalties without any notice at all”, it claimed.
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It wasn’t until June 18, nearly four months after investigators had requested its data from Brady and five days before an appeals hearing, that Brady’s lawyers informed the league the phone had been broken.
