Chances are this won’t satisfy the media or football fans, but New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick finally spoke about deflategate during his first press conference after the team’s AFC Championship victory. He said he had no idea about the deflated balls and is cooperating with the NFL’s investigation.
Back on Wednesday, league sources told ESPN that their investigation found that 11 of the 12 game balls for the Patriots were under-inflated. The NFL rulebook says that game balls must be inflated between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds, but ESPN’s sources said that the Patriots balls were under-inflated by 2 pounds.
Belichick opened the press conference with a prepared statement, telling reporters that he was not even aware of the process in preparing game balls, even though he’s been coaching in the league for four decares.
“I had no knowledge of the various steps involved in the game balls, and the process that happened between when they were prepared and went to the officials, and went to the game, so I've learned a lot about that,” Belichick said. “I obviously understand that each team has the opportunity to prepare the balls the way they want, give them to the officials and the game officials either approve or disapprove the balls. That really was the end of it for me until I learned a little bit more about this the last couple days.”
He explained that during practice, he makes the balls as terrible as he can to prepare players for any condition. Later, he suggested that quarterback Tom Brady would have more to say about how he prefers the balls he throws.
Then, Belichick explained that the Patriots like to inflate the balls to the lower end of the required spectrum, so it is possible that the game balls could deflate in play below that limit.
“As an example, if a ball deflated from 13.2 to 12.9 it wouldn't matter. But if it deflated from 12.5 to 12.3 it would – as an example,” he said. “We will take steps in the future to make sure that we don't put ourselves in that type of potential situation again.”
He rarely touches a ball during a game, Belichick said, so he hasn’t had to familiarize himself with the process of getting a game ball ready. He concluded his statement by stressing that the team is being fully cooperative with the NFL investigation.
“The National Football League is investigating this situation. We have cooperated fully, quickly and completely with every request that they have made; [we] continue to be cooperative in any way that we can. I have no explanation for what happened,” he said. “That's what they're looking into. So I can't comment on what they're doing. That's something that you should talk to them about.”
While Belichick did take questions after the statement, he didn’t say anything, often answering questions by replying, “I don’t have any explanation for what happened.”
Now, we wait for more comments from Brady, although he did laugh off the situation on Monday.
The Patriots did beat the Indianapolis Colts 45-7 on Saturday and will play the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX on Feb. 1. If the investigation does find that the Pats did purposefully deflate balls, they could be fined and lose draft picks.