Tom Brady destroyed his cell phone before meeting with the NFL about Deflategate

The NFL has denied Tom Brady's appeal and upheld his four-game suspension for his involvement in the Deflategate scandal.

One of the most intriguing pieces of new information to come out of the report is that Brady had his assistant destroy his cell phone on or around the day he met with the NFL.

According to the NFL's 20-page decision, Brady destroyed the cell phone he had been using since November 2014 on or around March 6, 2015 - the day he met with NFL investigators for the Wells report to talk about why the balls were deflated during the AFC title game.

Brady's legal council didn't tell the NFL that the cell phone was gone and the 10,000 texts messages on it couldn't be retrived until June 18, a few days before his appeal hearing. Brady said it's common practice for him to destroy his phone and SIM card when he gets a new one so no one can "reset it or do something where the information is available to anyone." He started using a new phone on March 6 and destroyed the old one, despite the NFL asking for electronic information weeks earlier.

This matters because the NFL's most convincing circumstantial evidence against Brady is that in the days after the AFC title game he suddenly started texting and calling the two Patriots employees accused of carrying out the plot to deflate the footballs.

The NFL said that destroying the cell phone hindered the investigation. From the decision:

"Mr. Brady's direction that his cell phone (and its relevant evidence) be destroyed on or about March 6 is very troubling. Rather than simply failing to cooperate, Mr. Brady made a deliberate effort to ensure that investigators would never have access to information that he had been asked to produce. Put differently, there was an affirmative effort by Mr. Brady to conceal potentially relevant information and to undermine the investigation."

While it makes sense that a major celebrity would take some extreme steps to make sure no one could get access to one of his old phones, the NFL poked a hole in Brady's explanation. According to the NFL's decision, Brady didn't immediately destroy the phone he used from the spring of 2014 until November 2014.

"No explanation was provided for this anomaly," the league said.