It's possible that the NFL's investigation into Deflategate is taking longer than expected because the NFL needed some time to track down all the footballs used in the AFC Championship Game.
According to ESPN's Adam Schefter, a league employee was fired Jan. 18 for selling footballs that were used in the AFC title game.
Schefter explained the firing during an episode of ESPN's Outside the Lines on Wednesday.
"There are a few different league officials, according to people I spoke with [on Wednesday], at the game, who handled the footballs," Schefter explained. "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."
One of those employees is responsible for taking footballs out of play during a game so that the league can use them for "charitable endeavors." For instance, you can sometimes bid on game-used footballs on the NFL's auction site, with the money from the winning bid going to charity.
Schefter then explained how that played a role in what happened at the AFC title game.
"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," Schefter said. "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."
The employee who was fired by the NFL probably would've kept his job if he hadn't aroused the suspicion of a fellow co-worker.
"Employee 2 noticed that one of the balls was missing from League Official 1, so he went to get a different one. When League Official 2 came in, he tried to replace the [missing] football," Schefter said. "League official 1 noticed that the ball was missing, noticed that people knew [he took a ball], he brought the ball back into the game, so there were then two different league officials handing balls to Jim McNally for use in the game. It sounds like a very unique, murky situation."
If McNally's name sounds familiar, that's because his name was tied to a Deflategate report on Tuesday. McNally, a Patriots locker room attendant, allegedly tried to give an unapproved football to an official during the game. However, according to Schefter, McNally may have had an unapproved football because he was given balls from two different people.
"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."
OTL host Bob Ley then asked Schefter if this was the first time the now-fired league employee had tried to sell footballs or if it was an illegal "side business" that League Official 1 was running.
"There was a Pattern of behavior that has existed with this particular individual," Schefter said, confirming that this wasn't the first time League Official 1 had tried to sell footballs.
If you're keeping track at home, here's what we know about Deflategate so far: The Patriots may or may not have deflated footballs. A locker room attendant that may or may not have been McNally took a bag of footballs into a bathroom before the game. An NFL employee tried to sell Deflategate footballs and there's also a theory that the Colts deflated the Patriots footballs, so the Patriots would get in trouble.
Let's hope the Wells investigation, which isn't expected to be released for a few weeks, answers every question because there seems to be a lot of them.
