Barely more than a week before the Super Bowl, he appeared at a news conference wearing a sweatshirt, slacks and a woolen Patriots hat, and a two-day growth of beard. He affected a soft, doe-eyed innocence.
Why, no, Tom Brady told a news media horde piled into a Foxborough bunker, he had not a clue how his game footballs might have been deflated below the prescribed league limit for the A.F.C. championship game. He was an old-fashioned X’s-and-O’s guy, he said. This business of tampering with footballs was all too conspiratorial for him.
The superstar quarterback was reasonable and articulate, and if not for his conveying too nervous a sense of ease as he gripped the lectern, he was utterly believable — almost.