New England Patriots Rumors: Tom Brady Will Be Suspended This Season No Matter What, NFL Source Says

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady may have won his court case against the National Football League when a federal judge threw out his four-game “Deflategate” suspension on September 3, but the seemingly endless ball-deflation saga is not over, apparently.

A “very influential person in the NFL” now claims that Brady will serve that four-game ban sometime during the current season after all, according to a sports talk radio host on a top New York station, CBS Sports reports.

[For an update to this story, please see the bottom of this article.]

The same day that Judge Richard Berman handed down his ruling erasing the four-game suspension of the New England Patriots superstar, the NFL filed an appeal of the decision with the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals, asking that higher court to overturn Berman’s decision and reinstate the suspension — or at least refer the case back to Berman for a new ruling based on the higher court’s instructions.

The whole “Deflategate” affair originated from the AFC Championship game back on January 18 when, after the Patriots blew out the Indianapolis Colts 45-7, reports surfaced in the media that the footballs used by New England had been illegally deflated below the league-minimum 12.5 pounds of air pressure per square-inch.

Veteran ESPN football correspondent Chris Mortensen asserted on his Twitter account two days after the game that 11 of the 12 balls used by the Patriots were measured at a full two pounds below the legal limit.

But when the NFL released its own report on the incident, including the true air pressure measurement numbers, Mortensen’s report was proven false. It was too late for the New England quarterback, however. The damage had been done and the NFL slapped him with a four-game suspension, first claiming that it was “more probable than not” that he was “generally aware” of Patriots employee’s deliberately deflating footballs.

After Brady himself appealed the suspension through the NFL’s own internal appeals process, league Commissioner Roger Goodell escalated the charge against Brady, saying that he willfully participated in a “scheme” to deflate footballs.

Goodell’s total lack of evidence to support the charge of a ball-deflation “scheme” was one of the factors leading Berman to vacate the Brady suspension as an excessive abuse of Goodell’s powers.

But the NFL appealed and now, according to WFAN Radio personality Craig Carton, the NFL plans to “expedite” the appeals process and has “no doubt” that Brady will be forced to sit out those four games at some point during this season. Carton claimed that his information came from a “very influential person in the NFL.”

Carton’s claim was met with skepticism, first by his own co-host on the Boomer & Carton Show, former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason.

“This person doesn’t realize,that they all felt the same way prior to Judge Berman’s ruling,” Esiason said on the WFAN program Friday. “I don’t buy it. I know they want to expedite an appeal, but there’s so many other things on the docket at these courts. Is this really that important to somebody? I know it’s important to the NFL.”

Longtime NFL reporter Mike Florio of NBC Sports and the NBC-owned site Pro Football Talk was even more firmly dismissive of the Carton report — even assuming Carton’s source is telling the truth.

“The NFL’s assessment of the case remains skewed to the point of delusional,” Florio wrote on Friday. “As a practical matter, there’s no way Brady will serve a suspension this year.”

Florio, a former practicing attorney himself, explained that without even a schedule of when legal briefs will be filed in the appeal yet determined, it appears doubtful that the case could be “expedited” to be heard this year.

UPDATE 2:35 PM EDT: The NFL has denied Carton’s report, issuing a statement saying that “it is highly unlikely that the appeal will be decided before the end of the season,” according to a Pro Football Talk report Friday afternoon.

Even if the appellate court did rule in the NFL’s favor, Florio stated, the result would likely be to simply throw the case back to Berman for a new ruling in he Tom Brady Deflategate case based in the higher court’s instructions. If that happened, he said, Berman would almost certainly allow the New England Patriots quarterback to continue playing during that process.

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