As if Deflategate could not get any messier or sillier, we now have this story.
ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported on “NFL Insiders” Wednesday that a league official responsible for taking balls out of play at the AFC Championship Game was fired for later selling the balls.
“There are a few different league officials, according to people I spoke with today, at the game, who handled the footballs,” Schefter said per Pro Football Talk. “League employees: League Employee 1, League Employee 2 and League Employee 3, we’ll call them, for lack of a better phrases, whose jobs are to handle the balls on game day. And League Official 1, he’s also supposed to take the balls out of play and then send them off to a charitable endeavor to raise money for a charitable endeavor that the league is embarking upon. Only on this day, and since that day, the league has since fired that employee for allegedly selling off some of those footballs on the side. So that employee — League Official 1 — has been fired since the AFC Championship Game.”
How does this pertain to the Deflategate case? It just shows us how carelessly things can be handled. From what we can tell, that is evidence from the scandal that can no longer be examined. This has been a pattern throughout the investigation. We have heard that the exact PSI of the footballs was not logged and that the league tried to set up a sting operation. It seems like things have been handled carelessly at many turns.
The situation of the referee selling the balls reminds us of the scandal when NBA referees were busted for swapping their first-class airplane tickets.
