Tom Brady has little of substance to say about Deflategate in the latest episode of his “Man in the Arena” docuseries.
The series has provided fascinating behind-the-scenes looks at key events from Brady’s New England Patriots tenure, both positive (like Randy Moss’ self-recruiting trip in 2006) and negative (Wes Welker’s Super Bowl XLVI drop). But Episode 6, which premieres next Tuesday on ESPN+ and focuses on the 2014 season, shares only surface-level insight into the overblown deflated-footballs controversy.
“I think the next morning is when I heard about it,” Brady says, recalling the aftermath of the 2014 AFC Championship Game. “… I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know what they were talking about, so I kind of just laughed it off. … I think everyone was trying to figure out exactly what was happening, obviously what we were being accused of doing. …
“I just remember walking in (to the first post-Deflategate news conference), and there was different cameras there than ever before. This was not a football story anymore. … When you’re being accused of something, first of all, you’re trying to figure out exactly what happened yourself.”
Brady blames the scandal, which dominated discussion during the leadup to Super Bowl XLIX and beyond, on “negativity” directed toward him and the Patriots.
“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,” the quarterback says. “All it is is negativity and people trying to take us down, and I think that part was familiar. …
“People don’t want to believe there was great, positive things behind what we had achieved. I think people want to believe that there’s always shortcuts to take and so forth. So I think everybody was just trying to answer what we could answer and move on so that you could really focus on the preparation for the Super Bowl.”
We’ll likely hear more about Brady’s ensuing Deflategate lawsuit and ultimate punishment (a four-game suspension) when he chronicles the 2016 season in Episode 7.
Episode 6 of “Man in the Arena,” a co-production by ESPN, Religion of Sports, 199 Productions and NFL Films, premieres next Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN+.
