It's all bullshit and fuck him.
Still, as far as a response goes, it's a good one and at least he said the words.
Before I get to the point of this post, I want to state three things clearly:
1) Roger Goodell is a coward. That's been on full display the last couple of weeks, if not all the way back to the Ray Rice incident.
2) Roger Goodell is awful with words and tends to make statements that put him in precarious situations weeks or months after he's made them.
3) Roger Goodell is the very definition of selling your soul for a giant paycheck. Roger Goodell IS that smug, douchey executive that mostly lucked into his role and money.
But here's what I think we all keep forgetting: Roger Goodell is a puppet. He's a figurehead in possibly the most literal sense of the word. He's truly just a mouthpiece and executioner for the 32 team owners in the National Football League.
I have ZERO doubt that, personally, he probably wanted to deal with Deflategate as much as Brady did. If you could drown him in half a dozen drinks, he'd probably admit that he thinks Brady is innocent. Honestly, I'm willing to bet that - personally - he genuinely couldn't give a shit less if Brady deflated footballs.
The problem is, as a coward that pockets personal ethicals in favor of making tens of millions of dollars a year, we only see the "professional" side of Roger Goodell. The side that isn't necessarily Roger Goodell himself (who I'm sure is still a dickbag, but likely a much more harmless one than "Roger Goodell, Commissioner"), but the side that represents the collective interests of 32 NFL owners.
His job is to take bullets for those guys. That's why they pay him all of the money that they do. His job is to make money for the owners and take PR bullets in the process. Because, let's not forget: as big of a coward as Goodell is, 31 of 32 owners are even bigger cowards for letting him take all the blame, all of the criticism around Brady's Deflategate punishment, while they hide and try to act like they had nothing to do with what happened to Brady.
But let's get real for a second...we all know they were the ones pushing Roger to not so much hurt Brady, but hurt the PATRIOTS. Again, I know we all know this, but the Brady punishment was merely just a way to try and level the playing field as much as possible (per heat being applied to Roger and then subsequently Brady and then subsequently the Patriots), which is really indicative of 31 of 32 owners being nothing more than horrible, sore losers, full of sour grapes, that would rather destroy a legacy than try to figure out how to create one of their own.
Why am I bringing this all up? Yes, Roger's been hiding the last couple of weeks. Yes, he's scared of getting booed on national TV. But while Patriots fans anxiously await their moment to vent their frustration at him, BRADY knows who that anger should really be directed towards: the owners.
Which is why this has been such a great season for him. He knows the owners punished him for outworking and outsmarting the guys they drafted before and after him, for being a "good soldier" to his team and doing things like taking pay cuts to free cap space, for being the key player on a team that's been dominating all of their teams for a decade-and-a-half. Brady knows the role of commissioner is truly faceless; anyone wanting to make $20, $30 million per year would act similarly to Roger if the owners offered them the job as well.
That's why Brady's destroying the league. As in, the other teams. Yes, he wants Goodell to have to hand him the trophy, but I don't think that's because of a personal vandetta against Roger; he wants Roger to have to have him the trophy to smite the 31 owners that pushed Roger to punish him in the first place.
Brady understands that Roger is a pawn. The real checkmate would be standing atop the 31 other teams - again - months after he was forced to do it with one hand tied behind his back.