Tom Brady's comments about the first week of deflate-gate will certainly draw a lot of compassion from people. Right.
The New England Patriots quarterback said that as the controversy over the team using under-inflated footballs during the AFC championship game brewed, and Brady was blamed by many, he felt it.
"I personalized a lot of things and thought this was all about me, and my feelings got hurt," Brady said on WEEI's "Dennis & Callahan Show." "Then I moved past it, because it’s not serving me. What’s serving me is try to prepare for the game ahead. I’ll deal with whatever happens later. I’ll have my opportunity to try to figure out what happened and figure out a theory like everyone else is trying to do. But this isn’t the time for that."
Let's pause as everyone rushes for their violins.
Brady has a point, of course, although it will be drowned out by fans' conspiracy theories. Despite no evidence that he was involved with deflating footballs he was accused of wrongdoing all week, and might be for many weeks to come. The NFL is investigating. But the NFL won't talk to Brady until after the Super Bowl, the quarterback believes, and he is ready to move on for this week. He told WEEI, "I don’t plan on talking about it at all" during Super Bowl week. And he reiterated he did nothing wrong.
"Absolutely not,” he said. “Look, I don’t want to keep getting into this. No, I didn’t and I haven’t and I never will. That’s obviously how I feel and the kind of person that I am.
“No one knows the facts. I picked 24 balls, that’s what I picked. Whatever happened after I did it and whatever the situation was where they measured them, I have no idea [about] any of those facts. I try to stay really humble and deal with the facts that I know. When you don’t know something, all I can say is I don’t know. I know that’s not always the answer that people want to hear, but that’s the reality.”
Brady also shot down the knee-jerk reaction that coach Bill Belichick sold him out last Thursday, saying that Belichick and him are always on the same page and Belichick is the only coach he wants to play for.
Even though his feelings were hurt by all of the things that were said last week, he turned it into a positive.
"Everyone will say, ‘God, it’s been a tough week for you.’ It’s been a great week for me," Brady told WEEI. "It’s been a great week for me to really be able to recalibrate the things that are important in my life and understand the people that support me and love me and care about me. That’s been the best thing to come out about this week."
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdowncorner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
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