The news of the NFL report on the Patriots' Deflategate,­ along with Tom Brady's written defense has reverberated outside of New England into national headlines. But why is it such a blow? And what does it say about Boston and the NFL?

The NFL report implying Tom Brady's guilt, and the quarterback's defensive legalistic response, has Deflategate morphing into something we could call Bradygate.

"Tom Brady is the golden boy to top all golden boys," said Caryl Rivers, professor of journalism at Boston University.

"He's handsome, he's a good teammate, he's married to a supermodel," she said. "Tom really is not the seedy, Southie kind of criminal as portrayed by Whitey Bulger. And he's not the Boston Brahmin either. He's sort of this stranger who has strolled into our midst and we've just fallen in love with him."

It's that duality of Boston's image that Bradygate really seems to exemplify.

There's the clean-cut Boston of Harvard, MIT, world-famous hospitals, the marathon, the Freedom Trail.

And the gritty Boston of the Irish Mob, depicted in films like "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" and "The Departed" in the pre-gentrified neighborhoods of Southie and Charlestown. Until the NFL report, Tom Brady lived in the former. Now Brady has a foot in both worlds.

"Let's face it. While Aaron Hernandez murdered somebody, Tom Brady may have squeezed a football, or had the ballboys deflate it a little bit," Rivers said. "In the annals of scandal, that's pretty low."

Granted, they were two hugely different situations, but were we as concerned about Aaron Hernandez's future? Or what it meant for the team's reputation? Brady's image transcends that of an athlete.

"He's a really great representation of honorable masculinity," said Michael Jeffries, professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. "In particular, honorable white masculinity in a terrain that's dominated by black men as athletes."

Jeffries points out that these stories make headlines, and are

quickly forgotten. Boston's tenuous faith in its football players aside, Jeffries is hoping the NFL will treat players' behavior as more than a passing, external problem.

"This case gets so much attention from the media and from the public," he said. "The cases of domestic violence and sexual assault by other players like [Greg] Hardy and Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, and the way the league has failed to deal with those — they didn't have a conduct in place, they instituted arbitrary penalties. The league uses this new crime to

deflect attention from its own failures to deal with far more severe moral violations."

Those moral violations play into the complicated reputation of this sports-crazed city.