Here’s why I don’t care that New England’s Tom Brady ‘cheated’

It took a little more than three months, but investigator Ted Wells finally got around to releasing the findings of his exhaustive report on “Deflategate” — the scandal surrounding the use of under-inflated footballs by quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.

Wells concluded that Brady probably knew the balls were deflated by Patriots team personnel. Three months, 243 pages and we get “probably knew?” Whoa there, Ted. You’re going to hurt somebody with that razor-sharp decisiveness.

“Based on the evidence, it also is our view that it is more probable than not that Tom Brady (the quarterback for the Patriots) was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of Jim McNally and John Jastremski involving the release of air from Patriots game balls,” the report reads.

The NFL has yet to hand out any punishment to Brady or the team.

Of course, Brady is being attacked from all angles. Chris Chase of USA Today wrote “Tom Brady cheated his way to a Super Bowl.” Jarrett Bell of the same publication wrote the NFL should punish Brady harshly.

By the letter of the law, Brady did cheat. He broke an NFL rule, and for that there should be a punishment. But I get the feeling that many of those casting stones at the four-time Super Bowl champ are the same people that complain about getting a speeding ticket for going 76 in a 65-mph zone.

My real problem is with the rule.

The league rule book states that approved footballs must be inflated to between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds of pressure per square inch. The findings of the Wells report indicate that Brady preferred his footballs under that range.

Text messages highlighted in the report between McNally and Jastremski from after the Patriots’ Thursday night win over the New York Jets on Oct. 4 indicate that Brady was very upset with the inflation level of the balls used in that game.

But let’s assume Brady used an illegally under-inflated football all season — it would be foolish to believe that this practice started in the seventh game of Brady’s 15th season in the league, wouldn’t it? He took 1,086 snaps in 2014, meaning he touched the ball — which had been conditioned to his preference outside the acceptable range of the NFL — on each and every one of them.

You know who else handled those same obviously illegally-inflated (yes, there’s sarcasm dripping off of that) pigskins 1,086 times while Brady was on the field?

An official.

That’s right, at least one member of the assigned NFL officiating crew, and probably two or three, touched those illegal footballs on every single play. How many of them suspected anything?

That would be a big, fat zero!

The officials, whose sole purpose is to enforce the rules of the National Football League, handled those footballs at least as many times as that damned cheater Brady. Surely such a brazen and egregious breaking of the rules would be picked up in no time.

Nope. Not one of them ever said a word or suspected that the balls were not legal. The only reason they knew anything could even be remotely amiss is because Indianapolis Colts general manager Ryan Grigson had tipped off the league, using information he gained from another franchise.

Opponents touched the ball, too. The Patriots committed 13 turnovers in 2014. Any of those players raise their hands to point out something didn’t feel right? That’s another resounding ‘no.’

In fact, Indianapolis linebacker D’Qwell Jackson, who intercepted Brady in the closing minutes of the first half of the now infamous AFC title game, had no idea.

“I wouldn’t know how that could even be an advantage or a disadvantage. I definitely wouldn’t be able to tell if one ball had less pressure than another,” he said.

The NFL bends over backward for its quarterbacks. They continually pass new rules to protect them, yet one of the faces of the league has his footballs manicured to his liking, and folks are coming out of the woodwork to label him a cheater and diminish his storybook career.

Forgive me if I’m not one of them, and I’m far from a Brady or New England fan.

I’ll contend until the day I die that the Patriots would have beaten the Colts in the AFC Championship Game and the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl if they had replaced the ball with a wet bar of soap.

Why not just pass another rule widening the range of acceptable pressure in a game ball? Quarterbacks are your meal ticket, right Roger Goodell? It seems far more prudent to increase the inflation range than have the name and reputation of one of the best players ever smeared nationwide.

It also seems foolish to me that a league with so many well-publicized issues on far more serious topics wasted three months and millions of dollars to determine that Brady “probably knew” something about it.