NFL Rumors: League Official Fired for Selling Deflategate Footballs on the Side

The NFL's investigation into Deflategate took a little detour after league officials discovered an employee selling the balls used in the AFC Championship Game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts.

The employee was fired on Jan. 18, Adam Schefter with ESPN reported. He explained on ESPN's Outside the Lines:

"There are a few different league officials, according to people I spoke with [on Wednesday], at the game, who handled the footballs. League employees -- League Employee 1, League Employee 2 and League Employee 3, we'll call them, for lack of a better phrases -- whose jobs are to handle the balls on game day.

League Official 1, he's also supposed to take the balls out of play and then send them off to a charitable endeavor to raise money for a charitable endeavor that the league is embarking upon. Only on this day, and since that day, the league has since fired that employee for allegedly selling off some of those footballs on the side. So that employee -- League Official 1 --has been fired since the AFC Championship Game."

Schefter added that League Official 2 noticed that one of the game balls was missing, which must have spooked League Official 1. That employee then went to get another ball to replace it at the same time that League Official 1 tried to put the ball back. Both officials then gave Jim McNally, a Patriots locker room attendant two different footballs for the game. Earlier in the investigation, the NFL believed that McNally was the one who tried to give the team unapproved footballs to use.

"All of this information has been captured on videotape that has been turned over to the NFL that will be documented in the Wells report," Schefter said. "Essentially, Jim McNally was given the footballs by the league officials assigned to work the game that day."

This was not the first time that League Official 1 has tried to sell game footballs on the side.

The Deflategate scandal started after officials found a deflated football during the AFC Championship game. The investigation discovered that 11 of the 12 balls used by the Patriots' offense were deflated. The league has not been able to uncover how the balls became deflated and who was responsible for it.

The Patriots went on to defeat the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX.