One of the more entertaining aspects of Sunday’s action came during the 12:00 p.m. ET hour, when Charley Casserly of CBS offered up, with jarring nonchalance, an account of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and former Patriots receiver Randy Moss going “toe-to-toe” in the locker room and having to be separated, in the days before the trade that sent Moss back to Minnesota.
Casserly said that Brady told Moss to cut his beard, and that Moss told Brady he need needs to cut his hair because he looks like a girl.
Denials of the account have since come from Peter King of NBC’s Football Night in America and Tom Curran of CSNNE.com. As one high-level Patriots source told King, “Someone is lying to CBS.”
On Monday morning, Boomer Esiason of CBS vouched for Casserly’s report.
"[Casserly] has been accurate almost every single time,” Esiason told WEEI’s Dennis & Callahan Show. “I don’t remember a time where he was inaccurate. . . . Charley does not go in front of millions of people on Sunday and make a fool out of himself unless he has something on lockdown. I would stake my own reputation on it.”
This is a dynamic that King considered carefully before contradicting Casserly, and King spent plenty of time on Sunday afternoon trying to get his information -- and ensuring that he wasn’t being fed an agenda-driven story or getting information from a source who didn’t really know what happened. I witnessed it; King was thorough and complete and sensitive to the perception that he would be calling out a reporter from another network.
Regardless of whether Moss and Brady ever got into a debate regarding grooming habits, a source with knowledge of the dynamics in the locker room told me Sunday that Moss was “wearing out” Brady and plenty of the other players on the team. So Moss wasn’t traded because he was a model citizen and a dominating player and a key fixture in the Patriots’ short-term future.