Tom Brady and Bill Belichick United in Not Knowing in New England

Brady Says League Has Not Contacted Him

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — The monosyllabic New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and his polysyllabic quarterback Tom Brady claimed to be united in mysterious unknowing.

Both said they were utterly baffled as to how their team came into possession of 11 footballs that had been deflated below the N.F.L. standard for Sunday’s A.F.C. championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. Such balls, admittedly beloved by Brady, are easier to pass, to catch and to run with than the standard balls of the oblong variety.

None of the Colts’ footballs were other than of regulation weight.

Belichick stepped first to the lectern in the Patriots’ press bunker Thursday morning. He has perfected his Gollum-pulled-blinking-into-the-light routine. With his matted, graying hair, his old jeans, his shirt sleeves rolled up under an old blue Patriots windbreaker, and his perpetually pained expression, he appeared to have wandered with great reluctance out of his football cave.

“Um, I had no knowledge whatsoever of this situation,” he began with a grimace.

“I have no explanation,” he added with a grimace.

“I’ve told you everything I know,” he concluded with a grimace.

Belichick, who harbors an abiding love of control, allowed that he has learned a lot about how footballs are weighed and used in games crucial to the $10 billion industry known as pro football. This crash course forced him to delve into the intricacies of the “inflation range situation” and to clarify his team’s “ball security philosophy.”

“I’ve learned a lot more about this process in the last three days,” Belichick said, “than I knew or have talked about it in the last 40 years.”

Isn’t continuous learning what life is all about?

Belichick suggested that Brady, like most quarterbacks, knew and cared far more about the woof and feel of the game football than the coaches did.

“Tom’s personal preferences in his footballs are something he can talk about in much better detail and information than I could possibly provide,” Belichick said.

This sounded as if the coach had rolled his quarterback under the team bus. But Brady, who over the years has played Curly to Belichick’s dour Moe, sounded blithely unaffected when he walked into the same press bunker six hours later.

When asked about this controversy by a radio host on Monday, Brady giggled at the absurdity of it.

He took a different stance Thursday, striving for wide-eyed candor as he stepped to the lectern in late afternoon. He had a growth of beard and a woolen Patriots cap, a sweatshirt and slacks; he affected nervous ease.

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I have no explanation for it.”

Reporters do what they sometimes do when they want to embarrass themselves, which is to hyperventilate and demand that the quarterback address the children of America and assure them that he is not a cheater. Brady more or less politely declined this offer. He noted that while the integrity of the N.F.L. mattered greatly to him, this matter was not quite of the same magnitude as medieval ISIS sweeping into central Iraq. Current events in the real world? Touché!

This said, Brady offered little more than a friendlier, more articulate version of his boss’s grumpy brick wall. Brady acknowledged that he had in the past said that he preferred softer footballs. But, he said, he never had in mind illegal deflation.

“I didn’t alter the balls in any way,” he said.

“When I felt them,” he said of the balls he picked for the game, “they were perfect. I wouldn’t want anyone touching those.”

So, how did it happen? Who tampered with the ball? And why didn’t Brady, with his athlete’s practiced and granular touch, notice that the balls were lighter or softer than normal? To all of these questions, Brady — whose control of his domain is more or less total — offered a rhetorical shrug. He had, he said, other things on his mind, like crossing routes and rushing linebackers.

Perhaps his most striking acknowledgment came toward the end, when Brady said the N.F.L. had yet to talk with him. It has been four days since the league discovered the problem.

Industrious as ever, those league investigators.

Belichick, too, allowed himself a parenthetical grouse. “It’s unfortunate,” he said, “that this is a story is coming off of two great playoff victories. But again we’ve been cooperative with the N.F.L. investigation.”

The coach, however, trailed history behind him like a dusty cloud. In 2007, his aides were found to have secretly taped and decoded the defensive signals used by the Jets’ coaches. For this, the N.F.L. fined Belichick $500,000, fined his team $250,000, and stripped it of a first-round draft pick.

(It’s worth noting that this Jets team, characteristically, posed no threat to the Patriots. It finished 2007 with a 4-12 record.)

As penance for that offense, Belichick was supposed to make a public breast of his transgressions. He instead issued a printed statement and declined to elaborate. When the league complained, he went doe-eyed. “I said I would address it,” he said. “I don’t think that was deceptive.”

Commissioner Roger Goodell said afterward that he felt misled. As Goodell has established himself as an expert on the subject of being misled, I’m inclined to believe him. Goodell’s people now are leading the investigation into Belichick and presumably are not predisposed to go easy on the Earl of Foxboro. Except, well, you could go broke betting upon the investigative acumen of these private eyes.

Belichick — who as he spoke was backed by an unfortunate “Gillette #Flexball” graphic — insisted he took pride in making his practice footballs as gooey and unpleasant to hold as possible.