Bill Belichick threw Tom Brady to the wolves

Both South Park and Saturday Night Live are going to have some new material after the Tom Brady press conference on Thursday.

Brady repeatedly denied involvement in the alteration of any game balls, gave a shout-out to the extremist ISIS group and even Rick Santorum took a break from a potential 2016 presidential run to give his insights about the "DeflateGate" scandal.  Suffice to say, the Brady press conference became a circus.

The absurdity of the press conference, no doubt, was the result of an earlier press conference conducted by Brady's boss, head coach Bill Belichick.  Belichick's presser, contrary to Brady's, was decidedly less jovial, as the three-time Super Bowl winner coach stoically, directly and forcefully denied any involvement in the deflation of 11 Patriots game balls prior to their AFC Championship victory over the Indianapolis Colts.

"I have no explanation for what happened," he said. "I honestly never touched a game ball. It's not something I have any familiarity with on that. Again, I was completely and totally unaware of any of this that we're talking about in the last couple of days until Monday morning."

Belichick's frankness means he has clearly drawn his line in the sand.  He believes he's innocent and has nothing to hide, but his direct remarks would be very easy to prove false should the league determine Belichick was involved in the scandal.  Belichick, however, failed to stop short of denying his own involvement, instead opting to throw Tom Brady's name into the controversy, effectively throwing his Hall of Fame quarterback under the bus.

"Tom's (Brady) personal preferences on his footballs are something that he can talk about in much better detail and information than I could possibly provide," Belichick said.

This suggestion led to Brady's press conference, originally scheduled for Friday afternoon, being pushed up to Thursday at 4 p.m.  What followed was the aforementioned media frenzy, where a seemingly overwhelmed Brady was grilled by questions, left at a loss for words at times and conveyed every emotional response from lighthearted joking to an almost trance-like seriousness.

Belichick's earlier press conference demonstrated his need to protect his own legacy, although he left himself in a tight spot.  Even if Belichick is cleared of all wrongdoing, and his press conference seems to indicate some level of sincerity of ignorance, he still will have to face Tom Brady knowing he, more or less, threw the second half of the greatest player-coach combo of all time to the wolves.