The biggest storyline coming out of the Patriots' 34-28 win in Super Bowl LI? Tom Brady's jersey being stolen from the New England locker room. As of Monday morning, the Patriots quarterback was still unaware of his uniform's whereabouts, but was expecting it to turn up on eBay at some point.
As of Wednesday, things are becoming a little more clear, with Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports doing some sleuthing of his own to determine the timeline league officials are working on.
Head here for Robinson's full breakdown, but let's give you a quick summary of the timeline:
10:05 p.m. CT: Brady was taken to a closed locker room largely filled with teammates and Pats employees
10:17 p.m. CT: Media members are allowed into the Patriots locker room
10:20 p.m. CT: Brady discovers his jersey missing, alerts Patriots employees
According to Robinson's sources, the jersey was "likely stolen from his bag prior to media entering" the Patriots locker room.
There's a 15-minute window from when Brady took the jersey off to when he realized the jersey was missing. During the majority of that window, the media were not in the locker room.
So what that does is take a massive group of potential suspects -- every media member who went into the Patriots open locker room -- down to a shorter list of potential suspects.
That group would be NFL employees, NFL security, Patriots employees, Patriots players and family members of the Patriots.
Someone either in the NFL or with the Patriots stealing Brady's jersey would take some pretty massive huevos. It would be, frankly, incredibly disrespectful. The guy just won his fifth Super Bowl and record fourth Super Bowl MVP and you're going to gank the jersey he was wearing?
The crime is also just tough to pull off. It's not like this was some Patagonia rain jacket that multiple people might be wearing and the criminal could just throw it on and walk off with. The Brady jersey would have to be grabbed out of Brady's bag, stuffed into another bag (or inside a shirt) and then scurried out.
That's because, according to Robinson's report, Brady put the jersey in a bag, but the bag itself wasn't taken. Only the jersey that he had previously placed into the bag.
It's not believed that the Patriots had any surveillance inside the locker room and the Texans and Texas authorities are still unsure what surveillance might be available to help the search outside of the locker room.
