The were called fakes, NFL plants and traitors. And those were some of the nicer reactions.
When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made his surprise return to Foxboro on Thursday night at the Patriots' preseason opener, he posed with three fans, who have caught plenty of grief from Patriots fans angry that they'd take a picture with the man who suspended Tom Brady for four games last season in the Deflategate aftermath.
“It’s a photo. People can get over it. It’s a photo,” John Miller, one of the trio who posed with the Commish told Boston.com.
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Miller, Spencer Shea and Josh Bisson said they were the fans who were asked by Goodell as they ran into the commissioner and NFL staffers on a Gillette Stadium ramp if they wanted a picture.
“We had like 15 seconds of normal stadium talk before he asked if we wanted to take a quick picture,” Bisson said
Initially, the some called it a set up by the NFL.
Even the Patriots fan who sold the tickets to Bisson, Jon O'Hara, who said he was a Pats season ticket holder and an old high school friend of Bisson, was critical of the three.
“I would’ve at the very least just been yelling stuff about Brady,” O'Hara told Boston.com. “I probably would’ve been chanting ‘Where are our draft picks? Where are our draft picks?’ I would’ve made it miserable for him to be there.”
Bisson said it's time for Pats fans to move on.
“I don’t really have any negative feelings,” Bisson said. “It’s easy to say something behind someone’s back, but the past is the past. We won the revenge tour, he had to hand over the trophies, and I think that kind of buries it. If we didn’t win, it might be a different story.”