Roger Goodell was asked by the BBC about the disparity between the punishments of Josh Brown and Tom Brady and suggested that the "public's misunderstanding" was to blame.

"The criticism that comes back to you is that people see punishments for touchdown celebrations but then only one game for a domestic violence incident. It must be very difficult to balance those things and explain them?" asked Richard Conway.

"They are," said Goodell. "I understand the public's misunderstanding of those things and how that can be difficult for them to understand how we get to those positions. But those are things that we have to do. I think it's a lot deeper and a lot more complicated than it appears but it gets a lot of focus."

Goodell tried to stress how off-field information isn't always fully available to the NFL.

"The issue that you want is ... that's why we'd like to speak to the people involved whether it's the victim or the people involved that may have information, including law enforcement," said Goodell. "But we understand that in certain cases they may not be permitted to talk to us or want to talk to us and we don't make judgments on people where they do that. What we want to do is get the facts and when we get the facts, we're going to aggressively pursue that, and we'll apply our policy."