Like it or not, Tom Brady has cemented a legacy in the NFL that will last forever. He has been the face of one of the most famous dynasties of all time at the New England Patriots before he led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a memorable Super Bowl victory at 43 years of age.

However, the success that Brady and the Patriots have accomplished under Bill Belichick has never pleased fans around the league. And the Deflategate scandal only made things worse, making them the main public enemies for a long time.

It all started when the Indianapolis Colts complained that Brady ordered the team's staff to deflate the footballs used in the 2015 AFC Championship game. The situation would get uglier shortly after, with Brady and the Patriots seen as villains and eventually receiving a four-game suspension and a $1m fine, respectively. A few years later, Brady confessed he didn't believe the accusations would escalate that much.

Tom Brady gets real on first reaction to the early Deflategate accusations

“I think the next morning is when I heard about it,” Brady said, as quoted by USA Today's PatriotsWire. "I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know what they were talking about, so I kind of just laughed it off... I think everyone was trying to figure out exactly what was happening, what was — obviously what we were being accused of doing…

"I just remember walking in (to a press conference), and there was different cameras there than ever before," he continued. "This was not a football story anymore… When you’re being accused of something, first of all, you’re trying to figure out exactly what happened yourself.

“We’d accomplished so much as a team, and here we are talking about something that we didn’t know much about at the time. All it is is negativity and people trying to take us down, and I think that part was familiar.”

By then, it looked like that was just the beginning of a never-ending conflict. A lot has happened in those long months but, eventually, everyone moved on. Brady and the Patriots went on to win two more Super Bowls in 2017 and 2019. And TB12, of course, claimed another ring in his first year with Tampa in 2021.