It has been eight years since the New England Patriots first learned about branding. The powerful kind, the type that defies all reassurances and historical truths. Eight years ago, they were caught doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in sports history, and they were forever typecast as cheaters in all but six states.
They’ve found time does not heal all wounds. America is not always forgiving to those who admit mistakes. And while slates can be wiped clean, this is the Internet era; for better or worse, some people and some things are destined for permanence.
There is no question that Bill Belichick understands this as he stands before a surprised media crowd on January 24. Spygate has made the Patriots suspects for life. It’s the reason Bob Kravitz, the Indianapolis columnist who broke the air-pressure story, wrote that Robert Kraft, “if he has an ounce of integrity,” should fire Belichick. It’s the reason influential TV host Michael Wilbon said the Patriots should lose their spot in the Super Bowl. Why else would former player Jerome Bettis, an analyst for ESPN, go on TV and call the Patriots “known felons”? Would the NFL leak to the media that it was “disappointed, angry and distraught” about the Patriots had it not been for 2007 and Spygate?
Two days earlier, Tom Brady stood at Gillette and told a boisterous crowd of reporters that he had no idea why the footballs were underinflated for the conference championship game. Based on the tone of their questions and the questioners’ subsequent reports, most of them didn’t take Brady at his word. It was a new experience for him, essentially being called a liar to his face, and it stung. Now Belichick was determined to share the information he’d learned after several days of performing science projects. He wasn’t scheduled to meet with the media but alerted them at the last minute that he wanted to talk. He had simulated the treatment the Patriots give their footballs during the week. He simulated the whole process, as the team normally would, to figure out what happened. The Patriots beat the Colts on January 18, and nearly a week later the head coach is breaking many of the rules that he’d long established. He’s looking back instead of forward to the Super Bowl. He’s listening to and taking on the noise. He’s doing someone else’s job.
“I just want to share with you what I’ve learned over the past week,” he says. “I’m embarrassed to talk about the amount of time that I put into this relative to the other important challenge in front of us. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an expert in footballs; I’m not an expert in football measurements. I’m just telling you what I know. I would not say that I’m Mona Lisa Vito of the football world, as she was in the car expertise area, all right?”
As appreciated as his My Cousin Vinny reference is, and as much sense as he makes with regard to plausible reasons for fluctuating football measurements, he has to know that the mistrusting public has one foot firmly planted in the Spygate archives. That’s always the case with the Patriots, whether they are accused of a new scandal or not. That is the unwritten penalty of Spygate, the football spirit incapable of being exorcised.
“At no time was there any intent whatsoever to try to compromise the integrity of the game or to gain an advantage. Quite the opposite, we feel like we followed the rules of the game to the letter in our preparations, in our procedures, all right, and in the way that we handled every game that we competitively played in as it relates to this matter.”
He has given hundreds of press conferences over the years. Maybe even he has developed that skill that journalists have, to recognize the moment when the conversation will change because something unexpected has been introduced. Belichick does exactly that, opening a gate for some reporter to walk on through when he says, “We try to do everything right. We err on the side of caution. It’s been that way now for many years. Anything that’s close, we stay as far away from the line as we can. In this case, I can say that we are, as far as I know and everything that I can do, we did everything as right as we could do it. We welcome the league’s investigation into this matter. I think there are a number of things that need to be looked into on a number of levels, but that’s not for this conversation. I’m sure it will be taken up at another point in time.”
He was right. The league had a lot to explain with its timeline, its paper trail, and its protocol for measuring air pressure. But that was for later. He had just mentioned something that got everyone’s attention. We try to do everything right. We err on the side of caution. The Patriots’ reputation is one of envelope-pushing and line-stepping. It’s why the league was leaving them unprotected in a sense, refusing to correct a three-day-old story by Chris Mortensen that it knew to be inaccurate. The veteran ESPN reporter was told that eleven of those twelve footballs were two pounds per square inch beneath the legal limit. It wasn’t true. Nor was it ultimately true what David Gardi, the league operations director, wrote to the Patriots the morning after the conference title game, saying that one of their footballs measured as low as 10.1 PSI.
That had always been in the walls of any Patriots discussion. A conversation about Belichick or Brady, a conversation by Belichick or Brady, somehow circled back to that. It’s the opposite of their early days together, when they were winning three Super Bowls in a four-year span. They’d never lost a play-off game, never been touched with a hint of real scandal, and their narrative then was valiant. They were capable of anything involving brainpower, ingenuity, composure. Ten years later, thousands of camera and hundreds of ball-deflation jokes later, they are the plausibly accused. They are capable of doing anything that’s thrown against a wall or behind an anonymous source. The cameras happened; why wouldn’t ball deflation? Why not bugging locker rooms? Screwing with opposing teams’ headsets? Manipulating the game clock? They were forever saints or sinners.
Belichick tries to conclude his press conference in a conventional way. He has already stood up for Brady and everyone in the organization, including Jim McNally and John Jastremski.
“This is the end of this subject for me for a long time, okay? We have a huge game, a huge challenge for our football team and that’s where that focus is going to go. I’ve spent more than enough time on this and I’m happy to share this information with you to try to tell you some of the things that I have learned over the last week, which I’ve learned way more than I ever thought I would learn. The process, the whole thing is much more complex—there are a lot of variables that I was unaware of. It sounds simple, and I’m not trying to say that we’re trying to land a guy on the moon, but there are a lot of things here that are a little hard to get a handle on. Again, there’s a variance in so many of these things, all right? So, I’ll take a couple questions and then I’m moving on.”
Does he think all the questions are going to be about the rubbing of the footballs, laces, stitching, tackiness, raised and lowered PSI? Some are, and a very obvious one is not.
“You said you always try to err on the side of caution and stay on the right side of the rules,” the question begins, “but with the videotaping it was clear that you were pushing the envelope on that. Is that something that changed that?”
It’s been eight years since Spygate and eight years since he’d said anything about it beyond the original sparse written statement. That has finally changed.
“I mean, look, that’s a whole other discussion. The guy’s giving signals out in front of eighty-thousand people, okay? So we filmed him taking signals out in front of eighty-thousand people, like there were a lot of other teams doing at that time, too. Forget about that. If we were wrong then we’ve been disciplined for that.”
“But,” the questioner challenges, “that’s clearly not doing everything you can to stay on the side…”
Belichick, who came out to talk science and air pressure, is now replying to Spygate. He is annoyed by the questioning, but if he thought about it he’d see that this is the same thing the NFL does. The league connects anything his organization says to something that he has already done, whether the events are connected or not. The commissioner is talking about Spygate four years after he made his ruling on it. It isn’t a leap to suggest that he and the people he represented, the owners, still have some resentment over Belichick’s defiance. The head coach got caught, showed no remorse, and then his team reeled off eighteen consecutive wins. Were there New Yorkers, in the league office, rooting for him to fail then? Are there now? When it comes to Spygate, there is no statute of limitations. There always is the presumption of guilt. He animatedly interrupts the attempted follow-up.
“The guy’s in front of eighty-thousand people. Eighty-thousand people saw it. Everybody on the sideline saw it. Everybody sees our guy in front of the eighty-thousand people. I mean, there he is. So, it was wrong, we were disciplined for it. That’s it. We never did it again. We’re never going to do it again and anything else that’s close, we’re not going to do either.”
There are a few more questions about air pressure. He’s clearly had enough. The NFL has already announced that its investigation into what happened with the footballs will be headed by prominent attorney Ted Wells and the league’s executive vice president, Jeff Pash. Wells is known as a legal superstar, with a long list of wins for those whom victory seemed difficult. He got an acquittal for U.S. Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan on grand larceny and fraud charges in 1987. A decade later, he got an acquittal for U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, accused of receiving improper gifts. He was even on the side of Exxon Mobil in criminal and civil disputes. Now he is on the side of a client, the NFL, that will pay him millions of dollars to produce a report on air pressure. His work has already begun on that. Meanwhile, Belichick and his staff can finally begin the work of focusing on Seattle.
In the time that Robert Kraft has owned the Patriots, the team has earned trips to seven Super Bowls. What Kraft doesn’t realize, as he makes his way back to Glendale for title appearance number seven, is the appetite for conflict coming from NFL headquarters. It doesn’t take much investigation to figure out that someone in the league office had tipped Chris Mortensen for his inaccurate air-pressure report. His story contained the same error, 10.1 PSI in one of the footballs, as David Gardi’s letter to Kraft had. Earlier than that, there certainly was something that didn’t add up about the communication between the Colts and the league before the game. It seemed like a concern that should have also involved the Patriots beforehand.
On January 27, Kraft and his son Jonathan were on the team plane to the desert as they learned that yet another leak had occurred in the supposedly confidential investigation. Jay Glazer of Fox reported that the league was focusing its investigation on a “person of interest” who was seen on camera taking the footballs into a Gillette Stadium bathroom. That person, still not known to the public, is Jim McNally. The Krafts finally caught on to what was happening, and it angered them. They could now see that the league had not been evenhanded in the early stages of the investigation. As the media awaited the arrival of the plane, the Krafts drafted a letter.
The plane’s arrival in Arizona, the opening of the doors, and the greeters on the tarmac were all standard. All of that changed when the owner entered the sprawling resort hotel where the media awaited. He wasn’t interested in the usual winking, backslapping, and niceties of Super Bowl week. He read from his letter.
“I want to make it clear that I believe, unconditionally, that the New England Patriots have done nothing inappropriate in this process or in violation of NFL rules. Tom, Bill and I have been together for fifteen years. They are my guys. They are part of my family. Bill, Tom and I have had many difficult discussions over the years. I’ve never known them to lie to me. That’s why I’m confident in saying what I just said. It bothers me greatly that their reputations and integrity, and by association that of our team, has been called into question this week.”
He and everyone else in the organization remembered what it was like the last time they were here. He remembered that endless session with the league in February 2008, hours before the Patriots were going to try to win one more game and thus win them all. The good news was that he had been to multiple Super Bowls. What annoyed him, and his fans, was that these things tended to avalanche.
“I am confident that this investigation will uncover whatever the facts were that took place last Sunday and the science of how game balls react to changes in the environment. This would be in direct contrast to the public discourse, which has been driven by media leaks as opposed to actual data and facts. Because of this, many jumped to conclusions and made scarring accusations against our coach, quarterback, and staff questioning the integrity of all involved.
“If the Wells investigation is not able to definitively determine that our organization tampered with the air pressure in the footballs, I would expect and hope the league would apologize to our entire team, and in particular to Coach Belichick and Tom Brady, for what they’ve had to endure this week. I’m disappointed in the way this entire matter has been handled and reported upon. We expect hard facts rather than circumstantial leaked evidence to drive the conclusion of this investigation.”
Despite what NBC had planned on Sunday, this was the real pregame show. It was the power source of the Patriots, Kraft, taking on the NFL’s representative of power, Roger Goodell. Kraft had been in the position of awkward dance partner, trying to support his coach and quarterback while also maintaining his status as one of the handful of owners who can move league mountains.
He had always supported Goodell, even when the commissioner made statements that seemed contradictory. The real lesson, the sounds of silence from his fellow owners, hadn’t resonated yet. He would start to see those in the spring, the billion-dollar faces of self-preservation and the status quo. Soon enough he would learn that they would never dream of apologizing to him or the Patriots. Apologize? For something the commissioner had supported? No, no. Never that. Many of them were just like he used to be. Whenever they saw something that the commissioner had done, they either said nothing or cosigned on the dotted line.
The only meritocracy left for the Patriots was on the University of Phoenix Stadium field for Super Bowl XLIX.
There were just three Patriots players who were there in 2008 for one of the biggest upsets in NFL history: Brady, Vince Wilfork, and kicker Stephen Gostkowski. So at least there would be clear minds for this game against the Seahawks. Seattle annihilated the Broncos the year before, and there wasn’t any drop-off from the 2014 version of the team.
“Two years in a row!” Seattle receiver Doug Baldwin screamed to teammate Ricardo Lockette before the game. “We proved that we belong! Let’s do this.” Baldwin’s words were layered. He was talking about the team belonging, and he was talking about himself and Lockette. They were both undrafted players, and those players regularly fought to forge an identity and simply be remembered. What better place to achieve that than the Super Bowl?
Ball deflation and preparation had been on Brady’s mind more than usual. He had been in constant contact with John Jastremski since the news from the Colts game broke. He was initially hurt by the torrent of criticism that “Deflategate” brought to his lap. But leading up to the game, he was able to block out the speculation and commentary and zero in on what the Seahawks did well. He, Josh McDaniels, and Belichick were all in agreement that they needed an even quicker, even shorter passing game to be successful against Seattle’s speed and aggressiveness. He also knew, better than anyone on the team, how meaningful and personal a win would be for the team.
“It’s our time,” Brady told his teammates. “It started seven or eight months ago, right? All for this moment, all for this moment. It’s about honor. It’s about respect. We win this game, you’re honored. Your kids are honored. Your families are honored.”
In the first quarter, he played like a man who was happy, finally, to be facing a defensive line rather than a bank of microphones. One of his teammates, defensive end Chandler Jones, watched from the bench and said to Wilfork, “They can’t stop the crossing routes.” Although the opening quarter was scoreless, Brady knew there were points on the field to be had. “They haven’t stopped us yet,” he said to Edelman, bemoaning the missed chances.
The Patriots scored six minutes into the second quarter, Brady to Brandon LaFell for eleven yards. Just before the two-minute warning, powerful Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch scored from the three to tie it.
Brady found easy money with thirty-six seconds left in the half. He noticed linebacker K. J. Wright lined up one-on-one against Gronk. Wright was at a disadvantage, and even the Seattle sideline knew it. “They’re going to eighty-seven,” one of the players said, without a trace of panic. Brady lofted it high where only Gronk could get it, and the tight end showed how he really plays when he’s healthy in a Super Bowl. Twenty-two-yard touchdown and 14–7 lead.
Sometimes classic games can be identified early, and that’s what this was becoming. It is also true that sometimes classic games are a function of poor plays, and that was the unfortunate Super Bowl story of Patriots corner Kyle Arrington. He was having a bad Sunday on the big stage, and Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson routinely looked his way when he needed a completion. He got one, and more, with eleven seconds left in the half. He hit Lockette with a twenty-three-yard completion, and Arrington made it worse by grabbing his face mask.
Clock stopped. More yards. Touchdown to Chris Matthews on a back-shoulder fade just before the half.
With the score tied at 14 and the third quarter beginning, Seattle receiver Jermaine Kearse had a scoop for his offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell. “So, twenty-five got benched,” he said of Arrington. “Twenty-one is in the game now.”
He was talking about Malcolm Butler, a player that most hardcore football fans had never heard of. His football journey was so unusual that it hadn’t always included football. He and Gronk were just one year apart, twenty-four and twenty-five, respectively. When Gronk was being drafted by the Patriots in 2010, Butler was working the drive-through at a Popeyes Chicken in Mississippi. He had been kicked out of Hinds Community College near Jackson, Mississippi, taken some classes an hour away at Alcorn State, and then traveled another two hundred miles to the University of West Alabama in a remote town called Livingston. The university’s motto is “Do Something That Matters.” Butler tried: He was undrafted, but the Patriots signed him in May 2014, and by August he had a football future and two nicknames. Players called him “Strap” due to his propensity for big plays and shutting people down in practice. Strap was sometimes called “Scrap” as well because of his willingness to scrap for the ball, his position on the field, his place on the roster. Doug Baldwin and Ricardo Lockette could definitely relate to that mentality.
In a brief training camp update called “What We Learned,” a reporter for the Portland Press Herald in Maine singled out Strap/Scrap: “Malcolm Butler, an undrafted free-agent cornerback from NCAA Division II West Alabama, continues to make plays, a forced fumble and fumble recovery on the same play, and looks like he’s going to stick.”
The problem in the third quarter was that the Seahawks, with the best defense in football, had surged ahead. A key play was an interception by Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner, who had been crouching in the zone unnoticed by Brady. “Dumb throw,” Brady said dejectedly as he explained his thinking to McDaniels. When Baldwin, nicknamed “Angry Doug” by his teammates, scored on a pick play (the back judge shielded Revis), it was 24–14. Richard Sherman, who had trolled Brady two years earlier, found a camera and held up two fingers, then four, and then two hands for a touchdown. He was either saying that the score was on Revis, number 24, or that the Seahawks had 24 points.
In any case, things didn’t look good. The Patriots went three plays and out on their next possession after the Seahawks touchdown, and with Seattle getting the ball and up by 10, a classic game had a chance to turn ugly. New England got a soon-to-be forgotten big play from Rob Ninkovich, an eight-yard sack of Russell Wilson, to stop a Seattle drive and return the ball to the offense and Brady.
Before the offense took the field, Belichick had been on the sideline, instructing. Brady was on the bench and Belichick was on one knee in front of him. “No negative plays,” he reminded him. “If you gotta get rid of it, you gotta get rid of it. The chances of them playing three good plays on defense in a row; they don’t look very good. You know, pass rush, everybody is running by you. They get misplaced in their zone, you know what I mean? Just no negative plays, and we’ll keep it close.”
After a nine-play drive that began with 12:10 left in the fourth quarter, Brady responded with a touchdown to Danny Amendola, and it was 24–21.
Seattle, strangely, got pass-happy. Leading by 3 with the ball and under eight minutes remaining, the Seahawks didn’t try to grind it away with Lynch. They tried two passes and a run, and gave the ball back to Brady and the Patriots.
Ten plays and nearly five minutes later, Brady found Julian Edelman for a touchdown and 28–24 advantage. “That’s a championship drive, Jules,” he told him.
Seattle coach Pete Carroll, the man who had the distinction of succeeding Bill Parcells and preceding Bill Belichick as the Patriots head coach, was unconcerned. “Here we go. We’ve got two minutes to go,” he said into his headset as he confidently walked the sideline. “We’ve got three timeouts. We need a touchdown to win. We’ve been doing this all year. Let’s go do it again.”
No one in the stadium or New England was relaxed. The Patriots had been here before, and these were the situations that had led to abbreviated nights of sleep and what-if debates over breakfast in the cafeteria. They had led the Giants by 4 here in 2008, roughly with the same amount of time in the game, and lost. They led the Giants again, in 2012, late in the game. Ahead by 2. And lost. Belichick always talked about doing your job, and part of that meant focusing on the present, not reliving yesteryear.
But it was hard. On the very first play of the drive, Wilson found—who else?—Lynch on a wheel route for thirty-one yards. One play, and nearly one-third of the field was taken. This was going to be yet another dramatic finish. The Patriots just didn’t play breathe-easy Super Bowls.
After Malcolm Butler defended a pass to Kearse and defensive back Brandon Browner, a former Seahawk, did the same thing on an attempt to Chris Matthews, agita descended on the Patriots bench. Brady sat next to McDaniels and they both shook their heads, silently, as if they both knew they were in an impossible spot. Kearse was defended by Butler, and young Strap made a good play by getting his hands on the ball and tipping it. But Kearse continued to focus on it and made the reception on his back. Butler kept his eyes on the receiver, noticed that he still had the ball, and got up to tackle him at the five.
“He caught it! He caught it! He caught the ball!” Carroll exulted.
“Man,” Brady said softly, his energy from a few minutes earlier gone. He had thrown for 328 yards and four touchdowns. He was well on his way to being the Super Bowl MVP, for the third time. He was going to match Joe Montana with his fourth Super Bowl win. None of that mattered now. “The D’s gotta make a play,” he said to McDaniels.
Lynch got the ball on the next play and barreled four yards to the one. There were smiles across the Seattle sideline, and Super Bowl parties in the Pacific Northwest were jubilant with the expected winning score. It wasn’t just the Northwest. It was everybody but New England. They were the cheaters, the guys who were one yard away from remaining in the noose of Spygate and, now, Deflategate.
Palms were sweating. The crowd had a nervous buzz. Time seemed to be going faster than it was. “If I’m Bill Belichick, I’ve got to be calling timeout!” a raspy-voiced Boomer Esiason told his national radio audience. The clock went from fifty-seven seconds to fifty to forty-five. “I don’t understand why he’s not calling timeout!” The clock went all the way to twenty-six seconds. The Seahawks had called a timeout, surprised that Belichick hadn’t done it first. His assistants had shouted into his headset, asking him if he wanted to pause here and discuss strategies, but he hadn’t said anything. His eyes were fastened on the Seahawks and the activity on their sideline. They seemed to be in a bit of chaos.
He noticed that they were sending three receivers onto the field, so the Patriots were going to match the formation with their goal-line package, which included three corners. One of them was Strap. “Three corners, three corners. Malcolm, go!” yelled safeties coach Brian Flores.
Less than a year ago, he was unemployed. Now he was lined up in the Super Bowl, and he knew exactly what was coming. He had been beaten on this play in practice, and the coaches told him that he needed to do his job better and get over to the receiver faster. It was a pick play, and there was a two-step method to defending it: quick recognition and relying on a teammate. It was the formula that made the first three Super Bowl winners so beloved in New England. Those players studied, and they leaned on one another.
In this case, thirteen years after the Patriots’ first Super Bowl win in New Orleans, Butler needed to know what the two receivers across from him and Browner wanted to do. Kearse planned to pick Butler, setting up a clear path for intended receiver Ricardo Lockette. The Seahawks had run the play three times during the season in the same situation, and they hadn’t been stopped. Butler remembered this play from practice and so did Browner. The veteran, Browner, would jam Kearse and allow Butler to make a one-on-one football play with Lockette.
The Seahawks had a former first-round pick in the backfield in running back Lynch. They had a third-round pick at quarterback who could run in Wilson. But with one yard to decide the Super Bowl winner, this came down to two undrafted players from the South, Butler and Lockette. One of them, either Butler from Vicksburg, Mississippi, or Lockette from Albany, Georgia, was going to become his hometown’s star of the night.
At the beginning of the season, in New England, the idea was that a new cornerback would help the Patriots win a Super Bowl. But Darrelle Revis was in a matchup on the other side of the field.
Just as expected, the play came. Butler was ready for it. He ran full speed and got to the spot the same time as Lockette, which was the receiver’s first surprise. Lockette had been a track star in high school, and his raw speed at the scouting combine was the characteristic that made teams remember him. But Belichick always preferred football-playing speed over sprinting, and the instincts of Butler proved why that was so important. The second surprise for Lockette was that he was bumped off the play and lost sight of the ball. He fell to the ground, initially facing the Patriots bench, and the first person he identified was number 12, Brady, excitedly jumping and screaming. Then he turned to the other sideline, with all his teammates and coaches, and that was truly his ground-level view of what had just happened. Back at Butler’s last school, West Alabama, the motto was in flashing lights; Butler had unquestionably done something that mattered.
“It’s intercepted at the goal line!” Kevin Harlan declared on the radio. “It’s intercepted by Malcolm Butler! Malcolm Butler has intercepted Russell Wilson… at the goal line!”
It was the play that won Super Bowl XLIX, with a nod to the previous three that the Patriots had already captured. They used to be known for players and plays like this. They knew all about low-drafted and undrafted players, starting with their quarterback. They knew about the power of collaboration, which is why they got a thrill from being introduced as a team and promoting football’s least regarded, the kicker, as one of their heroes. They even knew about cornerbacks changing the course of Super Bowls with interceptions. Now there was a link, from Law to Butler.
“No matter what he does the rest of his career, he’s got a memory that’s going to extend beyond his own lifetime,” Law says. “I thought that was a helluva play. He went in hard, he read it, he knew it. He was confident. For a young guy to have that type of confidence and go for it, I love it. Just that play right there is going to put him in the conversation with the greats. Forever. If he puts in a decent body of work over a period of time, that’s going to define him. You never want one play to define you, but sometimes it’s not your choice.”
Butler was so overcome by the moment that he cried. He had a hard time speaking when teammate Chandler Jones looked at him, beaming, and said, “Hey, man. You just won us the Super Bowl.” Brady approached and said, “Malcolm! Are you kidding me? You’re unbelievable, man.” Brady was due a new truck for being the game’s MVP, but he had already decided what driveway that vehicle would be parked in: Butler’s. Because of tax codes, this was going to be a costly gift from Brady to Butler, even though the car was free. It didn’t matter.
For a night, at least, this was better than the requested apology from the NFL. If the league ever did something like that, it would be forced and corporate. The displays breaking out on the field here were genuine. There was an “I love you” uttered at a rate of once every fifteen seconds. Actor Mark Wahlberg, a Boston native, hugged Brady and told him he was the best quarterback of all time. Julian Edelman told him the same thing, while the receiver told Belichick, “I’ll do anything for you, Coach.”
It was such a special night that even Marshall Faulk, a frequent Patriots critic and Spygate commentator, didn’t mention it once. Instead, he sat on the NFL Network set and smiled and shook hands with Brady, three-time Super Bowl MVP. Brady complimented all the ex-players on the set, Faulk, Michael Irvin, and Deion Sanders. At the end of their nearly ten-minute conversation, Brady warmly put his right hand on Faulk’s bald head and again gave him a compliment. He was aware of all the things Faulk had said over the years, but now those things were irrelevant.
The Patriots had indeed won since Spygate, so there was no need to think about that anymore. But Deflategate wasn’t going away. The bill was due on yet another scandal. It was a scandal with consequences, and thinking about and protesting them was going to occupy most of spring and all of summer.