Was the NFL out to get the Patriots all along?

I'm not one to believe in conspiracy theories, or such things as frame jobs. But as each day passes, the more I believe that Deflategate was one giant frame job.

Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, who has been firm in his defense of the Patriots throughout the entire ordeal, would agree with many Patriots fans on this. He recently said he thinks Ted Wells was expected to find the Patriots guilty of wrongdoing no matter what.

Per Mike Petraglia of WEEI:

"I believe that Ted Wells thought he was expected to find the Patriots were guilty," Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio said of his impression of the Wells Report in a podcast with The Big Lead, taped this week after the completion of Tuesday's 10-hour merry-go-round in New York City.

That's not a fanboy making the charge in some chat room somewhere. That's the founder and owner of one of the most powerful and respected football websites intimating that the league was paying its "independent investigator" $5 million to find the Patriots guilty.

That's a pretty damning accusation from someone who, just Wednesday, pointed out that Brady didn't come across to league officials as well as Adam Schefter chronicled on Tuesday night, after the hearing with Goodell.

This is nothing new, but everyone knows by now that Roger Goodell had to be firm with any sort of punishment if he wanted to look like he had some sort of clue as to what he was doing. He still doesn't, but that's beside the point.

The Patriots were an easy target because of Spygate, a minor offense when you look at the bigger picture. Deflategate was also a minor offense, but part of the reason it went spiraling out of control was because Goodell did nothing to stop it before it became a world wide phenomenon. It also didn't help that ESPN took this and made it look like the Patriots were guilty from the jump.

Not only that, but Tom Brady was treated like a repeat offender, even though he had nothing to do with Spygate. It's not fair to Brady, but most people don't care about that.

Florio also touched on the AEI report, which was released two weeks ago. That report poked gigantic holes in the Wells Report and further exposed it for the crap shoot that it is.

"As for the science, I think that has been sufficiently debunked by people like the American Enterprise Institute," Florio told The Big Lead, confirming what AEI reported two weeks ago. "We've been making the point for weeks now you can't take four Colts footballs. And that's the comparison, you've got 11 Patriots footballs, and if the real numbers had come out early on, the Patriots would have been able to shout this down as normal application of the Ideal Gas Law. And oh by the way, the NFL is using two different gauges, which differ by up to .45 psi, which is embarrassing in and of itself. But those numbers didn't come out."

"And when they finally did come out," he said. "You had Ted Wells working with the company Exponent, which, among other things, has been the expert witness in a case arguing that secondhand smoke doesn't cause cancer, which is a ludicrous proposition, but it just shows you that there are companies out there that will give you whatever opinion you're paying for. It happens all the time, and it's easy to get jaded about when you're a lawyer, but it just shows that there's companies out there that will give you whatever opinion you're paying for. These companies will give you something scientific that proves whatever it is you want, and plenty of people, including me, believe that's what happened here."

With all this being said, there is more evidence to suggest this was a complete frame job from the beginning. Whether you choose to believe that or not is up to you.

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