The Sports Xchange

About 150 New England Patriots fans chanted and waved signs after they filled a Gillette Stadium parking lot in Foxborough, Mass., on Sunday to protest the four-game suspension of quarterback Tom Brady that resulted from Deflategate.

The event, known as the “Free Tom Brady” rally, was organized on Facebook by Pablo Munoz, a 22-year-old part-time janitor.

Munoz told the Boston Herald that more than 600 people said on the social website that they would attend the rally. However, Foxborough police sergeant John Chamberlin told the Boston Globe that his estimate of the crowd size on Sunday was about 150.

The protesters, many of whom wore Brady jerseys, held signs asking NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to rescind the suspension.

The rally was called a ”peaceful rally to protest the unjust football arrest of half God half man Tom Brady.” The planning for the event began on May 14, Munoz said.

The penalty was imposed on Brady after an investigation led by Ted Wells found it was more probable than not that Brady was at least aware of team employees who let air out of Patriots’ footballs prior to January’s AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts.

Goodell plans to hear Brady’s appeal of the suspension soon, although no date for the hearing has been announced.

—Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster John Madden thinks Pete Carroll’s Super Bowl call will “torment” the Seattle Seahawks coach forever.

Madden said the memory won’t get any easier with time for Carroll, who has acknowledged he would always regret the decision to pass at the goal line rather than run in Seattle’s 28-24 loss to the New England Patriots.

“That will torment him forever,” Madden told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times during an interview that covered a wide range of topics. “Winning one game is hard. Getting to the Super Bowl is hard. Then getting that close and losing has to be tough, because we only remember the winners of the Super Bowl.

“One of the biggest gaps in sports is the difference between the winning and losing teams of the Super Bowl. They don’t invite the losing team to the White House. They don’t have parades for them. They don’t throw confetti on them.

“Does it haunt you? Hell yes, it haunts you. I’m still haunted by some championship games.”

Madden’s Oakland Raiders, who lost five conference championship games in seven years, won Super Bowl XI over the Minnesota Vikings in the 1976 season.

The 79-year-old Madden, who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006, talked about other topics — including Deflategate — during the hour-long interview with the newspaper.

“The league will change some protocol about the handling of game balls,” he said. “Here’s the thing that’s bigger than that: there’s a lot of people that have jobs that can affect the game, winning and losing, that are dayworkers. I think the game has gotten big enough now that we have to start eliminating some of these part-time guys and make them full-time guys. The guys who handle the footballs, the guy who handles the clock, the chain gang. We’re big enough now to have full-time officials too.”

—Pittsburgh Steelers president Art Rooney II feels the NFL will be holding games in Mexico and Germany within the next five years.

Rooney, one of the members of the NFL’s International Committee, is optimistic the league will stage games in two more countries. He spent time during the recent owners meetings working on the expansion of the league’s global footprint.

“If I had to put a timetable on it, I would be disappointed if we don’t have games in those two countries within the next five years,” Rooney told the team’s website.

“The audience in those two countries — there are enough NFL fans in both to support a game, and so it’s really a matter of being able to put together a stadium situation that would work well for us, as well as being able to put together a broadcasting and digital media-style programming so the games can be broadcast in those countries as well being played there.”

The NFL will hold three games in London in 2015 as part of the regular-season schedule. Overall, the league has scheduled 14 games in London since 2007.

—Buffalo Bills general manager Doug Whaley feels the quarterbacks on the team have an equal shot of winning the starting job.

Whaley denied reports that the team is moving on from quarterback EJ Manuel.

The Bills acquired Matt Cassel and Tyrod Taylor in the offseason to compete with Manuel for job.

“I look at it this way, in this business controversy sells,” Whaley said Friday in an interview with Jim Rome. “The more controversy that you can drum up, then the more interested people are going to be.

“For us we’re excited about the future of all three of those guys. It’s going to be a great competition. And we can keep three quarterbacks. So I dismiss that as just someone trying to get something stirred during this down time and lack of media stories for the NFL.”

Manuel has completed 58.6 percent of his passes while throwing for 2,810 yards, 16 touchdowns and 12 interceptions in 15 games with the Bills.

Whaley expects Manuel to compete with Cassel, Taylor and Jeff Tuel as the quarterback competition ramps up again with organized team activities getting underway Tuesday.

—Atlanta Falcons outside linebacker Brooks Reed suffered a groin injury during voluntary minicamp and could miss the start of organized team activities this week.

According to ESPN.com, the injury was termed “minor.” The Falcons begin their first OTA practice Tuesday.

Reed, formerly with the Houston Texans, signed a five-year, $22 million contract with the Falcons as a free agent in March.