Tom Brady spoke to reporters directly for the first time over the Deflategate scandal, acknowledging the toll it has taken on New England Patriots’ staff and their families.
On Thursday, a judge overturned Brady’s four-game NFL suspension, which was handed down after an investigation concluded he was probably aware that footballs had been deliberately underinflated during the Patriots’ AFC Championship game victory over the Indianapolis Colts. However, two members of the Patriots’ locker room staff – John Jastremski and Jim McNally – are still suspended over the incident. The NFL said that it would ban the two if the Patriots didn’t do so first.
“It’s been a very tough situation for everybody. It’s put a lot of stress on everybody’s families,” Brady said before team practice on Sunday. “I feel bad that anybody is in the position that we’ve been put in. Hopefully we can just keep learning from life’s experiences, and I certainly feel terrible for them that they’re not able to be with us right now.” Brady would not say whether he had been in contact with McNally and Jastremski.
Brady said he was now focused on the season opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers this coming Thursday. “It’s obviously been a long seven months for everybody, but I think now the goal is to focus on what my job is and what I need to go out there and do to help our team win,” he said. “Anything that has happened over the past seven months, obviously I have a lot of personal feelings. But I really don’t care to share many of those. I really care to think about what I need to do going forward. There are a lot of guys in this locker room that have worked really hard to get to this point, and so have I.”
Ben Roethlisberger will face Brady as the Steelers’ starting quarterback this week, and told reporters on Sunday that he felt that Brady’s punishment had been unduly harsh before it was overturned. “[I] just felt like the league had done something without ... I guess it was just more of a feeling, an inkling, of knowing that the commissioner jumped to a pretty harsh punishment,” Roethlisberger said. “I figured that would happen.”
Roethlisberger also said he had mixed feelings about the Patriots having one of the league’s best players at their disposal again. “I still have a ton of respect for Tom. I think he’s the best in the business. If you want to be the best, you have to beat the best,” Roethlisberger said. “Of course, one part of you doesn’t want him out there, because he is the best in the world. A bigger part of you as a competitor wants him out there because he is the best. It’s the way that NFL football should start, and that’s maybe one of the reasons I knew that Tom would be out there, because I knew the NFL doesn’t want to start a game without him out there.”
