He affected a soft, doe-eyed innocence. Why, no, Tom Brady told a news media horde piled into a Foxborough bunker, he had not a clue how his game footballs might have been deflated below the prescribed league limit for the A.F.C. championship game.
He was an old-fashioned X’s-and-O’s guy, he said. This business of tampering with footballs was all too conspiratorial for him. The superstar quarterback was reasonable and articulate, and if not for his conveying too nervous a sense of ease as he gripped the lectern, he was utterly believable — almost.
Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Patriots quarterback Tom Brady arriving for his appeal hearing at N.F.L. headquarters in New York last month.
Brady will be suspended for the first four games of the regular season.N.F.L. Upholds Tom Brady’s Ban; Cellphone’s Fate Helped Make the Call JULY 28, 2015
Now, after an N.F.L. investigation, findings, an appeal and a hearing, we learn that Brady possessed a piece of evidence that almost certainly would have loomed as conclusive: his cellphone and 10,000 text messages. In early March, perhaps on the same winter day he met with a league investigator, he ordered that phone destroyed.
