No smoking gun, no admission of guilt, endless pages talking about the statistical significance of a few tenths of a pound of pressure. When they start making adjustments based on how long the balls were sitting in a room before being measured based on someone’s recollection… there just isn’t a whole lot of there, there. I think if you want to find the Patriots guilty, there is ammunition in the report, if you want to find them innocent it is easy to rip holes in the report.
Not a whole lot to show for almost 4 months of work and probably millions of dollars spent.
So I wasted two plus hours reading the report and, as a Pats fan trying my best to be objective, my takeaways:
There's really no proof of anything.
Having said that, there's certainly a lot of smoke around McNally and Jastremski. If you believe that where there's smoke, there's fire, then I can see Wells' "more probable than not" conclusion that they did something wrong.
It's much harder for me to see the conclusion with respect to Brady. There's evidence in the text messages that Brady clearly expressed his preference for less inflation in the footballs, that he was ticked off about over-inflated footballs in the Jets game (that were recorded at 16 psi) and made his anger known, and that he wanted the footballs inflated as low as permitted. But evidence that he was even "generally aware" that a locker room attendant was deflating the footballs after inspection by the ref (assuming for the sake of argument that this happened despite the lack of any direct proof)? I really don't see it.
I’m sure every fan of every team other than the Patriots will be quite happy to see the Patriots given as much punishment as possible - Steelers fans are being particularly vocal about Brady having to be suspended at least for the season opener (against the Steelers) - but it sure doesn’t seem right to me to be accusing Brady of being a bald-faced liar based on the evidence (or lack thereof) presented in this report.
To me, as an NE fan, what mattered to me is the coaches and organization were cleared. No “Belicheat” crap. As for Brady, they don’t have much. As cosar notes, the only explicit reference I’ve heard is to an over-inflated football and then in the context that Brady chewed them out because it affected his throwing and they discovered the officials hadn’t even checked the balls after they inflated them. (That speaks volumes, doesn’t it? The officials over inflate balls, don’t check, etc. says a lot about how little the NFL cared about this.)
I have no idea what the league does. I don’t see why they penalize the team because they exonerate the team, which is the opposite of the New Orleans bounty case. They don’t have much to suspend Brady but beats me and they can certainly fine him. I would not be surprised if Brady doesn’t accept a suspension and goes after the league.
In terms of “scandal”, the NFL only took control of footballs fairly recently. The great QB’s of the past all had footballs massaged and beaten and rubbed up against sandpaper and put in dryers to soften the leather and change the shape to their preference. I would imagine the balls are more uniform these days.
It’s more of a comedy than anything. I’m not sure if it rises to legal standards but it appears that the main conclusion that can be drawn is that Brady is kind of a douche. Maybe they should penalize him by making him wear Uggs for a game.
No, based on more reading of the report, I’m getting an idea that the penalty here is going to possibly be serious. I"m not sure how those get decided, but its probably a combination of the perceived reaction of the public combined with whatever league consensus exists about how serious such a violation is.
Until it involved the Patriots and Brady, the league consensus was that nobody cared. Aaron Rodgers publicly admitted to intentionally having the footballs overinflated above the permitted limit (his preference) and no one even noticed. I’m assuming that if Brady is suspended on flimsy evidence, Rodgers will be suspended twice as long based on his public confession. Not. But it illustrates how totally absurd a suspension of Brady would be. If they try to suspend him, I’m confident he and the union will challenge it, and I expect that it’s a challenge he would win.
The Boston Herald printed a piece from a Dallas paper that essentially said they need to punish Belichick because no one believes he wasn’t involved … despite this report saying he wasn’t involved. That is why the NFL shouldn’t pay attention to stupid perceptions because they’re, well, stupid.
I just don’t know how exorcised to get over this. The report has a quote from a twitter exchange relating to an earlier game where one of the attendants complains that the refs screwed them because he measure some of the ball pressures at 16 psi after the game (presumably because Brady had complained?) If you take the other tweets as genuine, which they seem, then this one should be as well, and raises unaddressed questions about the overall procedures.
I have to wonder how disciplined the refs have been over time in policing this inflation policy. It would be pretty tempting to just grab each ball and compress it a bit to see if it felt “normal” and let it go at that. My guess would be that there was some of that going on.
Well, I’m no Patriots hater, but let’s give Brady the Giselle Buchen treatment; make him’ throw the F-ing ball and catch the F-ing ball at the same time.’
“11 Patriots footballs vs. four Colts footballs. In rejecting Bill Belichick’s explanation about the science of how PSI in footballs will naturally drop in certain conditions, the Wells report concluded that the average rate of drop in 11 Patriots footballs was significantly more than the average rate of drop in four Colts footballs. Why 11 to four? Because officials measured only four Colts footballs, as they were running out of time before the second half began. This simply isn’t fair to take a larger sample size and compare it to a smaller sample size. For example, I could just as easily pick the initial four Patriots PSI measurements (a drop from 12.5 to 11.80, 11.20, 11.50 and 11.00 from alternate official Dyrol Prioleau), match them up with the four Colts measurements (a drop from an estimated 13.0/13.1 to 12.35, 12.30, 12.95 and 12.15 from Prioleau), and come to a different conclusion that the drop rates of PSI between the two teams were close. Also, it’s clear when matching the PSI readings between the two alternate officials that there is margin for error in the readings. Thus, I reject the Wells report explanation for dismissing the role of science based on their usage of this uneven data between teams.”
He also notes the report makes a big deal out of Brady signing stuff, that it’s portrayed as payment for a service. He says Brady is known to sign stuff for staff and part-timers and it’s common to do this in part because they don’t make decent money.
Another point that I haven’t seen made in the commentary (though maybe it has been) is that the report says that all the footballs were brought back into the (warm) officials locker room at halftime and the Pats footballs were measured first. So the four Colts footballs that were measured right before the end of halftime would have had more time to warm up before being measured, and you’d expect the drop in PSI to be less in those four footballs than in the ones that were measured earlier.
A lot hinges around people’s recollections of how quickly they measured the pressure after they brought the balls inside, and how long it took to measure.
Mike Reiss’ objection was more basic: 4 versus 11 is a guess. Maybe you picked the 4 most inflated Colts’ balls and that understated the difference. Maybe you picked the least inflated balls and that overstated the difference. The point is that the sample sizes are very different and the comparison group is pretty darned small (and the memories of pressure measurements and who did what and so on only adds uncertainty). You can’t say the balls were absolutely different just that it seems that way.
My only note is the findings were “more probable than not” and that has become “likely” or “probably” in the press. That’s not what the term means when used by lawyers. It means more that they have suspicions. They could have said the “preponderance of the evidence”, which is tipping the scale at more than 50%, and which is the lowest judicial standard (in civil suits). But they said “more probable than not”, which isn’t likely or probably but means that after all this time they have a suspicion. The language could have become “less probable” which wouldn’t mean exoneration but that they suspect nothing happened. So in legal terminology, we have a report that says there are suspicions that they tend to believe may be true.
As for defending the team, the report exonerates the team. Note the word. They found no evidence to suspect any coaches or any others on the team including the equipment manager. Period. I see no reason to defend the team given that.
Thanks @notrichenough, I’ll admit that I wasn’t able to make myself wade through the “expert’s” report yesterday. I think this is probably the quote you meant to cite from page 203:
The emphasis on “completely” is mine, but it indicates that they acknowledge that it accounts for some of the difference. If you then parse the fine print, it appears that they also acknowledge that, in fact, this could account for all the difference:
. (Again, the emphasis is mine.)
This is just one more example of what bugs me about the report - there are a ton of plausibility and interpretation judgments piled up on top of one another with no hard evidence. I accept that the text messages are enough to make one very suspicious of McNally and Jastremski, though there’s clearly not enough even with respect to the two of them to stand up in a court of law (and yes, I understand that NFL policy has a different standard). But when you combine the fact that it requires a bunch of plausibility and interpretation judgments even to get to the conclusion the report got to on those two with the lack of any evidence linking Brady, it seems like they’re really just left with the Mark Brunell “gut instinct” analysis that Brady must have known about it because, well, he must have. For me, that’s way short of what would be needed to take disciplinary action against Brady. And why I think that if the NFL tries to suspend him, he’ll appeal and win.