NEW YORK CITY—Trent Green’s getting really tired of talking about “Deflategate,” especially with a new NFL regular season on the horizon.
“I can’t believe it’s dragged on this long,” Green, now a game analyst for CBS, told Breitbart Sports on Tuesday. “I can’t believe we are talking about it this far along. I think it all needs to be put to rest. Another season is about to get started and we are still talking about last season and ‘Deflategate.’ However they come to a conclusion, it just needs to be done with.”
So during Green’s long career, which featured stints in San Diego, Washington, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Miami, how did he prepare footballs before games?
“I would go in on a Saturday, and you had two bags of 12—generally first- and second-half footballs,” Green told Breitbart. “I would take the 80 or 160 footballs we had for the week, I would dump them on the floor in the training room or in the equipment room. I would literally go through each one and, through process of elimination, I would gradually get down to the 12 I like, and I would put them in one bag, and then I would get the next 12.
“To me it would come down to the feel of the laces, the feel of the leather on the ball. I can tell you this, that until this year, I had no idea what the pounds of pressure were. I just knew ‘This one doesn’t have enough (air), so add some more,’ ‘This one has too much, take some out.’ It was by feel. And I didn’t like an under-inflated ball and I didn’t like an over-inflated ball.”
Tom Brady, accused by the Wells Report of a “general awareness” of a “more probable than not” scheme to deflate footballs prior to the AFC Championship Game, fights a four-game suspension in federal court originally meted out and then upheld by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Brady, who in the past admitted a fondness for balls inflated just to the 12.5 lower limit, actually performed much better in the second half of the 45-7 rout over the Indianapolis Colts.
“Like I said, I didn’t know about actual pounds of pressure until this year. So this was all kind of knew for me when I heard this stuff coming out. For me, it was more about the feel of the ball. For me, I picked out my top 12, picked out my second 12. We zip-tied the bag and nobody touched them until the officials touched them whenever that was.”
So does Green think Tom Brady and the New England Patriots are guilty of illegally tampering with the air pressure of footballs last season?
“There are a lot of things you can speculate on, but I don’t if there isn’t actually any hard evidence showing somebody taking air out of [footballs],” Green said. “There is the gray area.”
And because of that gray area, Brady’s four-game suspension may become a two-game suspension or even a no-game suspension.
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