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Tom brady Offers Patriots Owner, Troy Aikman said he believes Tom Brady spearheaded Deflategate and Bill Belichick should pay dearly for it.

The Cowboys great and Fox analyst held nothing back in a Dallas radio interview Thursday when discussing the latest controversy to envelop the Patriots and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“It’s obvious that Tom Brady had something to do with this,” Aikman told the station, according to the Dallas Morning News.

“I know going back to when I played, they’ve loosened up the rules in terms of what each team is able to do with the footballs coming into the game. Used to, the home team provided all the balls. And now, each team brings their footballs the way they like them and break ‘em in. Used to you couldn’t break them in. So for the balls to be deflated, that doesn’t happen unless the quarterback wants that to happen, I can assure you of that. Now the question becomes: Did Bill Belichick know about it.”

Belichick denied just that when he spoke to the press after Aikman’s comments were made. Belichick contended he had no clue how the 12 balls were deflated below league standards in the Patriots’ 45-7 rout of the Colts in the AFC Championship Game.

However, the rule change Aikman discussed was actually advocated by Brady and Peyton Manning in 2006 when the star quarterbacks successfully lobbied the league. Brady noted at the time, in an interview with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, how each quarterback likes the football “a little bit different.”

Aikman sees the controversy as another black eye not only for the Patriots, but for Goodell. Aikman said Goodell’s “ignorance is no excuse” policy that he used to bury the Saints during Bountygate in 2012 will come back to hurt him again, just as it did when he bungled Ray Rice’s domestic violence case — in which Goodell used his own ignorance as an excuse for originally handing out a two-game punishment to the Ravens running back.

“Sean Payton did not cheat,” Aikman said of the Saints coach who was suspended a full year for Bountygate.
“There was nothing that Sean Payton and the Saints did that was illegal. And they did not give themselves a competitive edge. I maintain, regardless of whatever was said in the locker room, and in that locker room, is not anything different than what’s been said in any other locker room around the league. There’s no proof on the field of what took place that guys were targeting players. You can always pull out a play here and there. They were one of the least penalized teams for unsportsmanlike conduct. So there was no evidence that anything translated to the field that they were trying to hurt players. And they did not give themselves a competitive advantage.

Now twice, under Bill Belichick and possibly a third time, they’ve cheated and given themselves an advantage. To me, the punishment for the Patriots and/or Bill Belichick has to be more severe than what the punishment was for the New Orleans Saints.”

Where Aikman unfavorably compared the Patriots’ alleged antics to Bountygate, Ravens defensive lineman Chris Canty’s hot take likened ball-tampering to PEDs.

“The Patriots are habitual line-steppers,” Canty said in an appearance on NBCSN on Wednesday. “If the allegations are true, then you are talking about attacking the integrity of our game and I have an issue with that.”
“What I’m going to say about the deflating of the balls, to me there is no difference than performance-enhancing drugs. You are cheating at that point. You are getting a competitive advantage outside of the rule book and there has to be some sort of consequences for that.”

But will Goodell, a noted ally of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, punish the team severely?
“There’s a great deal of pressure on Roger Goodell, in light of everything that’s happened this year, and the way that he’s handled all of these situations, and hasn’t handled them particularly well by the way, and on this particular case, because there’s a lot of coaches and a lot of people that look upon the Patriots as a team that’s been favored in some of the things that have happened — I thought the punishment he got for Spygate was a slap on the wrist, was next to nothing — so we’ll see,” Aikman said.