BOSTON — (CNN) Tom Brady is back on the job.
But what about the two Patriots employees who allegedly had a more direct role in the “Deflategate” saga?
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Wednesday that the league is reviewing New England’s request to reinstate John Jastremski and Jim McNally. The team made the request Monday.
Jastremski, the Patriots’ attendant for the game officials’ locker room, and McNally, the Patriots’ locker room attendant for their own team, have been suspended without pay since May 6. That’s the same day that the NFL-commissioned Wells Report came out stating that it was “more probable than not” that the two men “participated in a deliberate effort to release air from Patriots’ game balls after the balls were examined by the referee” in violation of NFL rules in the AFC Championship.
Five days later, the NFL said Jastremski and McNally could get their jobs only if NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent gives his OK.
That same NFL statement outlined the penalties for the ordeal. For the Patriots, that meant a $1 million fine and the losses of their 2016 first-round and 2017 fourth-round draft pick — a punishment that team owner Robert Kraft opted not to challenge. For Brady, who’d just won his third Super Bowl MVP award, it meant sitting out the first four games of the regular season “for conduct detrimental to the integrity of the NFL.”
Yet Brady won’t be missing any time — at least right now — thanks to a 40-page ruling issued last Thursday by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman. Berman nullified the NFL’s punishment on one of its marquee players because of what he called “several significant legal deficiencies” in how NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his office investigated the issue.
The league has appealed Berman’s decision, though it’s not likely there will be any change in Brady’s playing status while the case works its way through the legal process. He’s set to start in Thursday’s NFL opener, which pits the Patriots against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Jastremski and McNally’s fate, however, is another matter.
The Wells Report had implicated the two men citing tests taken at halftime of last January’s AFC Championship game that found some Patriots’ footballs underinflated below league requirements. After an explosive second half, New England won that game 45-7 over the Indianapolis Colts.
Jastremski had been with the team for 14 years, the past three as the staffer in charge of preparation of game-day footballs. Surveillance video showed McNally had taken the Patriots’ and Colts’ balls — in violation of NFL procedure — to a bathroom and was in there for 1 minute, 40 seconds. McNally then took the balls to the field.
Neither of them has spoken publicly since the scandal broke. But they got support Tuesday from Brady himself, who told Boston sports radio station WEEI that he feels bad for the two men and wants them both to rejoin the club.
“Of course none of those things are my decision, but I feel terrible,” Brady said. “For what they’ve been put through, what their families have been put through … I just feel terrible they are not with the team.”
Commissioner Goodell insisted Tuesday on ESPN’s “Mike and Mike” show that the NFL wasn’t involved in Jastremski and McNally’s suspensions in the first place.
“Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No,” Goodell said. “That was a decision by the Patriots.”
Still, it appears now that the Patriots want both men back working. And it’ll be the NFL who decides if that’s the case.
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