Before You Press Play
- Narration: Greg Baglia reads a book whose most dramatic scenes happen in a courtroom rather than in an end zone.
- Themes: Deflategate, institutional power, comeback narrative, reputation on trial
- Mood: Combative and fast-moving
- Verdict: A strong reconstruction for anyone who watched from a distance, thin new material for anyone who followed it closely.
A bare numeral sits where a title usually goes, and this audiobook never explains it. No subtitle appears in the title field, so a browser gets 12, Casey Sherman, eight hours and eight minutes, and a football tag, then has to open the description to learn that the subject is the New England Patriots, the under-inflated footballs of January 2015, and the four games Tom Brady eventually watched from his couch before the comeback that ends the story.
What Casey Sherman Delivers
Casey Sherman's angle is access rather than adjudication. The copy promises dozens of exclusive interviews with Patriots players including Brady himself, plus his teammates and his lawyers, and the book is structured around what those people say happened rather than around a forensic reconstruction of ball pressure. That is the right call for a general audience and it sets the terms: this is the story of a scandal as it was lived by one side of it, and Sherman does not pretend otherwise.
Two institutions carry the conflict. Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell had old wounds that the investigation reopened, and the courtroom material is where the book earns its keep, because it is the part nobody watched on television. A quarterback described as more nervous in front of a judge than on a game-winning drive is the image the copy leads with, and it is a better hook than any of the physics. Sherman keeps the league's machinery in frame throughout, so the scandal reads less like a rules dispute than like a corporation deciding what to do with an employee it could not discipline any other way.
Greg Baglia gets the assignment, and the assignment moves between three rooms: a locker room, a courtroom and a stadium. None of the one hundred and forty-seven graders has left a written word about how that comes across, so nothing here is a claim about the delivery. What can be said is that the material demands three different tempos and a large cast of real people who are all quoted, which is a harder job than the football tag suggests.
One of the five written entries is not about the book at all. It records giving the title to a Brady fan as a Christmas present, which is a legitimate thing to post and useless as evidence. Counting properly, the usable column runs to four responses.
What Casey Sherman Gets Right
Even-handedness is the quality worth leading with, and it comes from an unexpected direction. An August 2018 five-star recommends the book to Patriots supporters and their opponents alike, on the grounds that it lays out both sides of what happened, and asks readers to come to it with an open mind before deciding. Coming from inside a fanbase that spent two years being called cheaters, that is a more interesting endorsement than a straightforward rave would have been.
Momentum is the other thing it does well. A June 2019 entry reports being locked in from the first paragraph and feeling the emotion of the situations as they were described, while openly acknowledging that being a Boston sports fan is part of the reason. Sherman writes news events as narrative, and the pacing that comes from that choice is exactly what a listening format wants: eight hours moves quickly when every chapter has a hearing, a leak or a game in it.
Timing helps too. The file arrived in July 2018, roughly eighteen months after the Super Bowl the book climbs toward, close enough for the participants to still be talking and far enough back for the outcome to be settled. That is a narrow window for sports reporting and this one caught it.
Where Casey Sherman Loses Some Ground
Novelty is the honest caveat, and a four-star from May 2024 states it plainly: entertaining, but if you already know the situation well, not much new information turns up. Anyone who followed the coverage as it happened, read the league's own report or argued about it for two years is buying the assembly rather than the revelations. The assembly is good. It is still an assembly, and the closer you were to the story in 2015 the less it will surprise you.
Reliability is the second caveat, raised by a five-star in October 2018 that likes the book while saying outright that it cannot vouch for everything in it and doubts anyone ever will. Given how much of the reporting rests on access to one party's account, that reservation is fair rather than hostile, and a listener should hold the more damning claims about the league loosely.
On the record itself, the missing subtitle is the practical problem. A title consisting of two digits is close to unsearchable, gives a browser nothing, and separates this file from every other Deflategate book on the shelf only by luck. The badge sits at 4.5 across one hundred and forty-seven ratings, which is a healthy sample for a sports title, and the category places it under sports and outdoors with a football tag, which is accurate but tells you nothing about the courtroom half.
Who Should Pick Up 12
Partisans of the team and their sworn enemies both get served, which is unusual. Supporters get the inside account and the vindication arc; opponents get a detailed map of how the league conducted itself, which is not flattering to anyone. Listeners who like sports books that turn out to be legal thrillers will find eight hours goes fast, and the chapters covering the suspension itself work perfectly well for someone who has never watched a snap.
Anyone hoping for a technical verdict on whether the footballs were deliberately deflated should adjust expectations, because the book is built on testimony rather than measurement. Readers who consumed every hour of the coverage in real time will recognize most of it. A buyer shopping by title alone should be aware that nothing on this listing spells out what the two digits refer to, so check the description before assuming you have the right book.
