Tom Brady on Deflategate Scandal: ‘We’d Accomplished So Much as a Team, and Here We are Talking About Something That We Didn’t Know Much About’

Tom Brady has certainly had a very successful career in the NFL. He is now considered the most winningest quarterback in the NFL history. But the course of his career wasn’t this shiny through and through. He’s had a lot of troubles along the way. Not to mention the Deflategate scandal that he was caught on with. The scandal even posed a threat to his hard-earned reputation.

The scandal came to light after the AFC Championship game between the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts in 2014. Deflategate, as the name suggests, was related to the controversy that the Patriots used to deflate their game balls, which made them easier to catch.

Later, it was found out that even Tom Brady was involved in the controversy. Text messages between Patriots employees mentioned the quarterback by name. This led to Brady’s suspension for four games at the start of the 2015 season.

Tom Brady recalling Deflategate

Mentioning that scandalous past, Brady in the latest episode of his docuseries ‘Man in the Arena’ recalls his side of the story. The quarterback says that he “laughed it off” since he had no idea what was going on. And in his first conference after the controversy, he recalled “that there were different cameras there than ever before,” and that the story had been broken beyond the realm of football itself.

“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, and all it is negativity and people trying to take us down,” Brady said regarding “Deflategate.”

“People don’t want to believe that there were great, positive things behind what we had achieved,” he added. “I think people want to believe that there’s always shortcuts to take and so forth.”

The Patriots won the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks that season. However, they did pay a huge fine for the scandal thus uncovered.

Also Read: “We Lost a Lot”: Tom Brady on Losing Most of the Offense but Scoring Big Against the Panthers