Mike Florio believes the NFL acted in a manner to portray the New England Patriots in a negative light with Deflategate.
Florio said that a common thread in all of the league's scandals was that “the NFL reaches a decision early on about what it wants to do, and they start from the ending point, and they work backwards to justify that knee-jerk gut-level reaction that someone at the league office gets.”
Florio believes it was the failure of Roger Goodell to react decisively in the Ray Rice debacle that enabled those beneath him to seize on this Patriots' situation.
“I think that they deliberately delayed the process of getting the real numbers out because having the false numbers out there kept the Patriots feeling like they were on the ropes when the reality was that they were on ropes that weren’t even there,” Florio said. “We didn’t get the truth until May. That is the one fact that bothers me more than anything in this entire ordeal, and that’s the one fact that causes me to believe that someone was out to get the Patriots. The false information was put out there, or deliberately not corrected.”