If only for just a few minutes, let’s assume Tom Brady panicked and destroyed his cell phone. Perhaps he had things on his phone that he was worried would be leaked to the public, but what if they had nothing to do with the inflation level of footballs?
Brady is a celebrity. His wife is a supermodel. Had we been talking about a team-issued phone, this would be a different story. Does destroying a phone on or around the day you are supposed to be interviewed look terrible? Of course, but is it out of the realm of possibility that he didn’t trust the NFL — the same organization that probably leaked this bogus report about the PSI level of game balls early on — to not leak the other stuff that may have been on his phone?
Maybe Brady cheated and felt that it was better to deal with the backlash from destroying a phone than it was to be caught redhanded. But on Wednesday, Brady claimed in a statement that he tried to “reconcile” at his appeal by turning over any electronic communications that Ted Wells had requested.
“To try and reconcile the record and fully cooperate with the investigation after I was disciplined in May, we turned over detailed pages of cell phone records and all of the emails that Mr. Wells requested,” Brady wrote. “We even contacted the phone company to see if there was any possible way we could retrieve any/all of the actual text messages from my old phone. In short, we exhausted every possibility to give the NFL everything we could and offered to go thru the identity for every text and phone call during the relevant time. Regardless, the NFL knows that Mr. Wells already had ALL relevant communications with Patriots personnel that either Mr. Wells saw or that I was questioned about in my appeal hearing.”
Not surprisingly, Goodell made little mention of this in explaining his appeal ruling. The commissioner only said that Brady offered up names of all the people he had been in contact with and that, basically, the league didn’t have time to contact all of them.
The one thing people seem to be forgetting is that in defending his investigation, Wells said that he told Brady and his legal team that they could go through the cell phone records and electronic communications and turn over anything they felt was relevant. Wells himself said that he would have been fine with Brady not handing over the actual phone. So, if what Brady says is true, how is that different from what he did during the appeal?
I don’t blame you if you think Brady is a cheater. The stuff we learned about his old cell phone looks pretty bad. But if you don’t believe the NFL is forcing the public to focus on the broken cell phone just to suit its overall narrative, you have a lot to learn about the league.
