Jets running back Stevan Ridley wasn’t on the field for the AFC Championship game thanks to the torn ACL that brought his season to a premature end, but Ridley was a member of the Patriots as they made their way to a Super Bowl title last season.
That meant he faced questions about Deflategate when he met the media as the Jets wrapped up their minicamp and offseason program on Thursday. Ridley wouldn’t say whether the penalties handed down by the NFL were correct and that he doesn’t “know what goes on there” before adding that “it happened” and that he thought the Patriots made a “mistake.”
“They made a mistake,” Ridley said, via NJ.com. “The best thing that can happen is that they deal with that on their own. That has nothing to do with the New York Jets, and this is where I am now. At the end of the day, the Super Bowl champs are the Super Bowl champs. The football is deflated or not, it took a lot of hard work to get there. I’m not saying they’re right; I’m not saying they’re wrong. But what I am saying is you can’t take away that they got that title.”
Ridley stressed that he didn’t have any “first-hand” information about tampering with footballs that he never used because of his injury and repeated that it was on the Patriots to deal with the issue while getting themselves ready for next season. The latter part of that is surely the main part of coach Bill Belichick’s plans for the next few months, although we’ll have to wait a while longer before finding out whether preparing Jimmy Garoppolo for his first NFL starts will be part of the process.