Seven years later, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell still finds himself sidestepping questions about Deflategate.
A report earlier this week from ProFootballTalk's Mike Florio claimed the league "expunged" PSI (pounds per square inch) data taken during the 2015 season to determine how footballs gained or lost pressure due to weather. Per Florio, NFL general counsel Jeff Pash issued a "direct order" asking the league to delete those numbers.
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The scandal resulted in a four-game suspension for then-New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and two forfeited 2016 draft picks for the organization. On Wednesday, Goodell was asked about the report and whether Brady, the Patriots, and the fans deserve to see the data.
"It's a long time since I've thought about Deflategate," Goodell said during his annual Super Bowl week press conference. "We were very clear that we were going to do spot checks to make sure that people were following the policies. That is something that we fully engaged in.
"I don't know what happened to the data, to be honest with you. We don't look back at that. We just make sure there's no violations. That's the purpose of the spot checks. Are there violations? And if there are violations, we need to look into them. But thankfully, we did not see any."
Had Goodell and the NFL not expunged the numbers, they could have been used as evidence that the Patriots' footballs were underinflated due to cold weather in the 2014 AFC Championship game, and not by deliberate manipulation.
In the end, Deflategate proved to be a blip on Brady and the Patriots' radar. Brady returned from his four-game suspension in 2016 to lead New England back to the Super Bowl, where it completed one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history vs. the Atlanta Falcons.