At this point it's fair to say the NFL was immediately convinced the New England Patriots deflated footballs in the AFC championship game and then worked backward with great diligence and, at times, great duplicity to conclude it as true.

The NFL mostly failed, although that doesn't guarantee the Patriots are innocent. New England very well might have deflated the footballs. There was, and there remains, plenty of suspicious acts that demand questioning after a guy nicknamed the Deflator took the footballs into the bathroom just before kickoff. It's just the league has never proven its case.



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No matter where you stand on the guilt or innocence of Tom Brady, et al, the actions of the league office grow more disconcerting and indefensible by the day, especially after Thursday's release of testimony and documents from Brady's appeal of his four-game suspension.





There is a laundry list of concerns here, starting with the fact no one in the league office knew footballs could naturally deflate. This ignorance lit the fuse of a scandal that is still burning. The NFL was prone to wrongly conclude that any measurement under 12.5 pounds per square inch was an act of cheating.

From there, pretty much every single action, conclusion or determination was designed to find a path to that original belief of guilt.

View photos With the flaws in the Deflategate investigation, can teams, players and fans still trust Roger Goodell? (AP) More

But this is about focusing on one curiously inconsistent point because going over all of them would take an entire book.

So let's look at Roger Goodell's conclusion that conversations between Brady and Patriots staffer John Jastremski after the news of the scandal broke are proof that Jastremski was running a cheating operation and Brady either knew about it, tried to cover it up or both.

Goodell and his investigator, Ted Wells, were obsessed with the fact Brady and Jastremski had not texted or spoken on the phone for six months until the morning after the AFC championship game, when news hit the league was investigating the Patriots' footballs.

Then the two started communicating, numerous times over the next few days, including a face-to-face meeting in the quarterbacks room in Gillette Stadium.

To the NFL, this was proof of guilt.

That alone was dubious. Why would Brady and Jastremski be automatically guilty for talking after they were suddenly in the middle of a massive scandal and media firestorm?

With the presumption of innocence, or even impartiality, their actions are quite understandable.

Once accused of playing with under-inflated footballs, of course Brady would want to find out what the heck was going on and talk to Jastremski. And of course Jastremski would want to profess his innocence – especially if he was really innocent – or theorize with Brady about how such a thing could occur.

It would have been far more incriminating if Brady and Jastremski never spoke.

Both Wells and Goodell, for instance, saw no issue in Patriots coach Bill Belichick, upon hearing the news, going to Brady and asking if he knew anything about the footballs. It's completely natural. So not with Brady?

Furthermore, after the first conversation between Brady and Jastremski, all other communication came under false pretenses. By late Monday morning the NFL had wrongly told the Patriots that their footballs were deflated as low as 10.1 psi – which put the organization on its heels because it was such a significant reduction.

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