Tom Brady Transcript: Colts Started Deflategate — Read Full Appeal Hearing Testimony, Now Public
The full transcript of the Tom Brady Deflategate appeal hearing is now a matter of public record and can be read online, including right here at the bottom of this Inquisitr page. The testimony shows that the Deflategate scandal was initiated by a top Indianapolis Colts executive during the first half of the AFC Championship Game on January 18.
The testimony also shows that the New England Patriots superstar quarterback not only denies that he has ever asked for a football to be deflated, but he also said that he does not even care about the air pressure level in footballs. In fact, he said, if an employee did alter the inflation of a ball, he would be upset because it would interfere with his process.
“I go through, like I said, this extensive process to pick out the balls for the game, and that’s the ball ultimately that I want on the field that I play with,” Brady says in the testimony. “So once I pick the ball out, then I don’t want anything other than that ball to be the one that I am on the field playing with.”
The testimony was among the documents filed with a federal court in New York Tuesday by the NFL Players Association, which is representing Brady in legal effort to force the league to throw out his four-game Deflategate suspension.
The documents reveal that the whole affair — which has dragged on now for more than six months — began when Colts General Manager Ryan Grigson sought out league executive Troy Vincent and told him, “We are playing with a small ball.”
Vincent immediately ordered that the game balls used by both teams be subjected to testing at halftime of the game.
He delegated that task to Mike Kensil, a league official who was formerly a top executive with the Patriots’ arch-rival, the New York Jets. It was Kensil who was named in media reports this week as the primary source for an ESPN Chris Mortensen story two days later, which claimed that 11 of the Patriots 12 game balls were underinflated by a full two pounds or more.
Though that claim was revealed as false by the NFL’s Deflategate report prepared by lawyer Ted Wells, a claim that the ESPN reporter did not retract until Monday of this week.
In fact, though his false story is generally credited with turning Deflategate from a minor, regional story into a national front-page scandal, he said on Monday that he now believes that the entire NFL investigation of the Tom Brady and the New England Patriots was unjustified, and that Brady should be exonerated.
Read the entire 173-page transcript of the Tom Brady Deflategate appeal hearing, below.
[Image: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images]
