Howe: How Hard Is NFL Really Trying To Solve 'DeflateGate' Investigation?
In the thick of DeflateGate, Boston Herald Patriots reporter Jeff Howe joined Toucher & Rich on Friday morning.
After recapping the circus that was Tom Brady's press conference, Howe said he's left with one unanswered question: "I want to know what we're supposed to tell our children."
Once the jokes subsided, Howe was asked what the heck is going on with this situation, which seems to continue to get weirder and harder to follow with every minute that passes.
"I'm not sure I can make any sweeping opinions on this entire story, and I have really tried to stay with that all week, because like you said everything is contradicting itself," Howe said. "And even if it's not contradicting itself, there are gray areas. Or if a point is made, there are five follow-up questions. And with nobody answering this stuff on the record, it's tough to know exactly what's true. You kind of just want to sit back and watch it all unfold, and I know my job as a reporter is to go out and try to find the answers to these questions, and so far I haven't really been able to do that.
"I know we've had some very talented, very seasoned, veteran reporters who have broken some fairly big stories along the way -- and I'm not trying to discredit those, but this is jut a weird situation where you're not really seeing the same big-time national reporters reporting the same things. One will come out with one detail, then another will come out with another detail that belongs in another corner of the room, and so on and so forth.
"And the league won't say anything. So what is real, what is not real, it's hard to say. And with the league not being transparent, with the league losing a ton of its trust with the Ray Rice investigation and then its own so-called internal investigation that followed that, and then with Brady coming out yesterday and saying that the league hasn't even talked to him ... I question how badly the league wants to get this thing done by the end of the week, or is it trying to let this filter throughout the Super Bowl and maybe find something into February?
"It's just, the lack of transparency and the lack of trust are not doing the league any favors. But Brady dropped the biggest bomb yesterday when he said the league hasn't talked to him. There's no excuse for that. The Patriots are coming off [having] two days off, the league has apparently had an investigative team in town since midweek, and they couldn't find the quarterback? Come on."
