Tom Brady will not be vindicated for all to see.
Just hours after the Super Bowl was finished, Kansas City Chiefs safety Tyrann Mathieu said in a since-deleted tweet that Brady started the verbal spat when he called Mathieu “something I won’t repeat.”
“He called me something I won’t repeat but yeah I’ll let all the media throw me under bus as if I did something or said something to him,” Mathieu said in a tweet.
“He’s clearly chasing me, but I got flagged,” Mathieu said in another deleted tweet.
On Thursday, the NFL released the full mic’d up audio of the Super Bowl, but they left out what everybody wanted to see.
There was a reason for that.
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“Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the NFL’s in-house production company won’t be disclosing the content of the exchange between Brady and Mathieu. As the source explained it, NFL Films typically does not reveal the audio of such squabbles between players.”
His words had a lot of people thinking a racial slur had been thrown around. That was not the case as Michael Irvin had alluded to earlier this week.
“I didn’t like that Tyrann Mathieu put that out like that, the way he put it out, honestly,” Irvin told Eisen. “Because, I go, ‘Come on now.’ It makes it sound as if — it makes people want to know, ‘What’d he say? We’re curious.’ As if he said the N-word, and he did not. Tom did not. So, you know, I didn’t even like that even looming over this situation. So that’s why I think we should clean that up somewhere, somehow. That’s what I’m saying. He didn’t say that.”
“I don’t think that’s fair and just for Tom, and when we leave it lingering like that, some people think or may say or have thoughts — and it wasn’t that,” Irvin said. “But also on our side, as an African American side, because I don’t want people to think, ‘OK, they’re just saying it again or implying it again.’ So it’s like it’s crying wolf, and then when it really happens, nobody listens. You see what I’m saying? So I want to squash all of that. This was just two guys competing. That’s what that is. It’s just two guys competing.”
As we know now, Brady called Mathieu the “ultimate competitor” in his apology text and said he knew he needed to match Mathieu’s intensity Sunday.
Brady also expressed his desire to apologize in person in the future.
Super Bowl LV was the fourth time Brady and Mathieu have squared off.
