Report: NFL employee fired after selling 'Deflategate' footballs

A league employee involved in the handling of the footballs in the New England Patriots' AFC Championship Game has reportedly been fired.

Adam Schefter explained Wednesday on ESPN that one of three league officials responsible for handling the footballs was fired for allegedly selling some of the game balls on the side. As transcribed by Pro Football Talk:

There are a few different league officials, according to people I spoke with today, at the game, who handled the footballs. League employees: League Employee 1, League Employee 2 and League Employee 3, we'll call them, for lack of a better phrases, whose jobs are to handle the balls on game day. And League Official 1, he's also supposed to take the balls out of play and then send them off to a charitable endeavor to raise money for a charitable endeavor that the league is embarking upon. Only on this day, and since that day, the league has since fired that employee for allegedly selling off some of those footballs on the side. So that employee - League Official 1 - has been fired since the AFC Championship Game.

Though the matter doesn't appear related to the Patriots' alleged under-inflating of the footballs, it's another strange development in a story that just won't disappear.

The NFL investigation into the Patriots is expected to conclude at some point in the next few weeks.