Deflate-gate blew up when a little more than a day after the AFC title game, ESPN, citing unnamed league sources, reported that 11 of the Patriots' 12 footballs were measured to be below 2 pounds per square inch of pressure below the league standard. It further said none of the Indianapolis Colts' footballs were below the minimum.
At the time, the only people with such information worked in the league office. That ESPN story changed the entire complexion of deflate-gate. No longer was this a curious case of potential gamesmanship on a subject that no one, including the NFL itself, had much base scientific information or previous concern about.
Instead it looked like an outright and deliberate cheating scandal, and a major one at that. It couldn't be a coincidence. It couldn't be natural. Someone needed to be punished.
Except the entire ESPN story was wrong. No Patriots football came in that low. None. Most weren't even close. And the few Colts footballs anyone bothered to measure suffered deflation also. The entire framing of the story was completely inaccurate.
If it was originally sold to the public as "some Patriots footballs were a little low, but others weren't and we used two different gauges to check so the numbers varied and we aren't sure what's normal to begin with and no one wrote down the original measurements and we ran out of time to do the Colts' conclusively so who knows about that and it was cold out and ... " this meeting isn't happening.
The league office is guilty of either leaking the fake story in the first place or, at the very least, not coming out to refute it with the actual measurement it had in its possession. Instead the NFL let Brady and the Patriots get crushed. What turned out minor was major. What was confusing was painted as clear. What begged for context was instead stamped as concrete.
The actions of the NFL are far more troublesome than whatever some New England lackey did in the bathroom, with or without Tom Brady's knowledge.
It's why Roger Goodell doesn't want that to become the story.