In his first of two press conferences about the NFL’s investigation into the use of under-inflated footballs during the AFC Championship game, Patriots coach Bill Belichick said that he had no knowledge of the way footballs were prepared for games.
He was the only coach facing questions about whether his team was breaking the rules about the way they were doing that, but he wasn’t the only coach in the dark about the procedures. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll was asked about the story of the day in his arrival press conference on Sunday and said that he was just as clueless as Belichick when the week opened. And, like Belichick, he’s spent some time brushing up on football handling procedures.
“Things come up and we have to face things sometimes for the first time, a first-time realization, that maybe everybody would think you should have seen it before. But I never checked on the whole process of how our footballs were handled until this week,” Carroll said. “I can empathize with Coach Belichick in that same way. I never have, so I can understand that he never has either. It’s something that just is part of the equipment standards that are carried out by our people in the organization. That’s one that has not been looked at maybe as intently as it is now, but I know every step of it now. So my awareness is up and I’m sure theirs is and everybody else that’s around our game in particular will never be the same because of what just happened.”
Carroll was asked other questions about the integrity of the game after a year that saw the league face crises on several fronts. He said he thought the deflated ball controversy provided the league with “another opportunity for us to grow and to see that we don’t have everything nailed yet,” but avoided the kind of direct comment on the Patriots’ situation that cornerback Richard Sherman made upon arriving in Arizona.