Average Reds, Your post at 16265 about my bona fides is ridiculous. For some reason, I cannot reply to posts from my work computer with them showing up, so I am just referencing the post number.
But accusing me of lying is beyond the pale. I accept your apology in advance because knowing you, you will realize how foolish that accusation was and then apologize.
My prior passing along a comment from a friend with connections tells you NOTHING about my biases. It tells you ONLY that I have a friend who was wrong. Given the intense interest here, I passed on his comments HOPING THEY WOULD BE WRONG. If I told you that the stock market was going to crash tomorrow and it did not come to pass, that would suggest to you that I was disappointed it did not crash and that going forward you would assume that my comments about the market were all tainted by that bias?
Let me be crystal clear. I have a very good relationship with being wrong. Happens all the time. That I am wrong on a topic doesn't remotely drive my opinions going forward or make me skew every conversation to undo that, horrors, incidence of being incorrect. Who does that?
If you spent even 5 minutes with me -- and really, if you read my posts here over the years -- you would know that I am as big of a Tom Brady fan as anyone. He is truly my favorite athlete of all time. In addition to all of the Super Bowls and accomplshiments, I know people who know him well, and have heard a lot about him off the field, and that only adds to my Brady Love. PS: If you ever get a video of his acceptance speech when he won SI's sportsman of the year, you will see something I made my kids watch until it was no longer on You Tube. Perfect example of gratitude, appreciation for parents, teachers and teammates. And of humility. I'm sorry it is no longer on line and would kill to get it.
All that said, I draw a conclusion from the flurry of calls between him and the ball dude. At best, it looks bad. I could believe that they were covering their tracks.
At the same time, as I have written repeatedly in this thread, nowhere in the Wells Report is there support for Tom asking for the balls to be deflated below 12.5. I could believe that Tom lied about knowing McNally, had made it known that he wanted the balls at 12.5 and was making sure that everyone's stories were straight in repeated phone calls after the story broke.
Separately, one of the people I referenced above knows both Tom and his Dad extremely well. He has spoken with Brady Senior about DeflateGate. Tom was crystal clear with Brady Senior that he never asked for balls to be below 12.5. My friend said that there's no way in hell Tom would lie to his Dad, whom he reveres, and I continue to believe that Tom never instructed deflation below 12.5, but that the calls in the following days do look bad and that there was some coordinating regarding the story going on.