PHOENIX -- NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was essentially unflappable yesterday in the face of New York Times-reported criticism by flap-friendly U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who has exchanged letters with the commissioner over the league's decision to destroy all evidence in September's Spygate case involving the New England Patriots.

Asked the same question eight different ways yesterday in his annual Super Bowl news conference, essentially why six videos of opposing coaches shot illegally at the direction of head coach Bill Belichick and notes taken as a possible result of such contraband were eliminated within 72 hours of being turned over by the club, Goodell responded with eight consistent answers amounting to a metaphorical shrug.

"There was no purpose for keeping them," Goodell said evenly. "They were totally consistent with what I'd been told. The tapes showed the coaching signals, then a scoreboard shot of down and distance. In one of them, a coach waved at the camera, indicating that he knew he was being taped.

"I concluded that they had a limited effect, if any, on the outcome of any game."

That's his story, and he's sticking to it, but it doesn't make any more sense today than it did in September.

This column was on record at the time objecting strenuously to the tapes' destruction, inasmuch as it left open the possibility that the league had found something on those tapes that gained New England an advantage in one of their three Super Bowl victories, jeopardizing public confidence in the league's prime brand name.

"That's a definite possibility," one high-ranking management source told me at the time. He said it again for emphasis. "That's a definite possibility."

Frankly, I believe Goodell when he tells me it's not true, but there are those less inclined to believe him, some of them in cities with franchises who lost Super Bowl games to Belichick, some of them lifelong fans of the Patriots' most recent victim, the Philadelphia Eagles, some of them apparently named Specter.

"I am very concerned about the underlying facts on the taping, the reasons for the judgment on the limited penalties and, most of all, on the inexplicable destruction of the tapes," Specter told the Times, adding that Goodell's explanations "make(s) absolutely no sense at all."

It never really did, but ostensibly the destruction was to insure that the intelligence gathered couldn't be used again, especially by the Patriots, but by any club who might subsequently employ someone with access to it.

"There was no indication," Goodell said again yesterday, "that it benefited them in any of their Super Bowl victories."

Goodell seemed to allow that part of the decision to destroy the evidence might have been informed by the fact that one of the tapes was leaked to Fox TV. The league launched an investigation, and soon made sure there were no more tapes to leak.

"I don't think you have to have a law broken to have a legitimate interest by the Congress on the integrity of the game," Specter told the Times by way of explaining his intense interest in the matter. "What if there was something on the tapes we might want to be subpoenaed, for example? You can't destroy it. That would be obstruction of justice."

Specter said that Congress might call Goodell to testify, but the whole story has some odd timing issues and perhaps conflict issues as well.

The Patriots, maybe you've heard, are widely considered on the verge of a fourth Super Bowl victory in a matter of hours, and the league is still lobbying to get the NFL Network included on Comcast's basic cable package. Comcast isn't budging, which is perfectly within its prerogatives, but it's perhaps worth pointing how Comcast's political action committee (PAC) was the second biggest contributor to Specter in the 2006 election cycle at more than $102,000. Further, as the Post-Gazette's Bob Smizik pointed out in a recent TV column, Specter intervened when it appeared the Federal Communication was going to vote on a proposal that would have brought the NFL Network and the cable giants to compulsory arbitration.

"I'm not addressing that [Comcast] point," Goodell said in response to a question yesterday from the Philadelphia Inquirer. "There were six tapes, some from 2007 and some from late 2006, and notes that had been collected, which I imagine many teams have, but these might have been collected by using an illegal action, so we wanted to destroy that, too, and we did."

But he shouldn't have, for any reason, perhaps the least of which was to save himself the eventual designation of pen pal to Arlen Specter.