New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft has come out in support of his embattled Super Bowl team. The Patriots have been at the center of a controversy now being called “deflate-gate” over the accusation that they deflated balls in their AFC Championship home win over the Colts.
A football under less total air pressure than the league requirement is easier for both the quarterback and his receivers to grip, especially in bad weather. This was said to give the Patriots an unfair advantage over the Colts.
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At a press conference held in Arizona ahead of Sunday’s big game there Kraft told reporters, “I believe unconditionally that the New England Patriots did nothing wrong in this process that was in violation of NFL rules.”
The NFL appointed Ted Wells to head its investigation into the matter. Wells said on Monday, “We are following customary investigative procedure, and no one should draw any conclusions about the sequence of interviews or any other steps, all of which are part of the process of doing a thorough and fair investigation.”
But a visibly angry team owner said, “’If the (Ted) 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 (Bill) 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.”
Interestingly, it has been revealed that the NFL knew about the deflated footballs long before the AFC championship game 10 days ago. Instead of holding an earlier investigation, or making sure to put a stop to it, the league reportedly chose to check the balls during halftime in order to catch the Patriots red handed.
On a lighter more, the entire Patriots organization made it out of the Boston area and headed to Arizona just in the nick of time. If they had planned to leave a day later then they would have been trapped in America’s great blizzard of 2015 which has now coated its entire northeast, shutting down all air and train traffic.
The Super Bowl will be played this Sunday evening, February 1st and will be broadcast live on NBC.
