Report: Brady Turned Down Deal From Goodell To Avoid Deflategate Suspension

For whatever else 41-year-old Tom Brady might be, he’s not a snitch, according to a new book.

In 12: The Inside Story of Tom Brady’s Fight For Redemption, authors Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge claim Tom Brady could’ve avoided his four-game suspension for Deflategate if he had been willing to throw two Patriots staffers under the bus for deflating his footballs.

If he was willing to do that, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would have let Brady off the hook with a $1 million fine. But, because Brady didn’t believe the balls had been tampered with, he was unwilling to ruin the reputations of the team’s equipment guys.

“He [Goodell] demanded that Brady state publicly that former Patriots equipment guys [John] Jastremski and [Jim] McNally had purposely tampered with footballs, even without his knowledge,” Sherman and Wedge write. “Tom said no.”

Of course, the NFL went on to suspend Brady for four games after a prolonged legal battle that kept making headlines long after it was even remotely interesting.

For what it’s worth, Brady and the Patriots did not respond to request for comment on the book.