|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
EvC Forum active members: 64 (9164 total) |
| |
ChatGPT | |
Total: 916,767 Year: 4,024/9,624 Month: 895/974 Week: 222/286 Day: 29/109 Hour: 2/3 |
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Deflation-gate | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
Pro Bowl safety T. J. Ward of the Denver Broncos complains that he's suspended for this year's opener because, My last name’s not Brady, but that's not really the important distinction. He's suspended because (this from Ticked Pro Bowler: NFL banned me because my ‘name’s not Brady’):
quote: There was videotape of the actual offense! That's hard evidence! In order for Deflategate to have any kind of factual basis, there needs to be some kind of hard evidence. Videotape of McNally entering a restroom is not hard evidence. Suggestive text messages are not hard evidence. Halftime football inflation pressures are not hard evidence if the inflation pressures weren't recorded pre-game. The NFL can't even provide hard evidence that the footballs were deflated, let alone that Brady knew about it. Beginning this season the NFL will be recording pre-game football inflation pressures, and then randomly measuring football inflation pressures at halftime and after the game. This also requires that the footballs be given time to return to their original temperature, but halftime is only 20 minutes (after the game they could wait as long as necessary for the footballs to reach ambient temperature). When I ran my own experiments I allowed 30 minutes for the football to reach ambient temperature. Maybe 20 minutes is enough, maybe not, but they wouldn't have the full 20 minutes. They'd need time to move the balls indoors when halftime starts, so let's say that's 2 minutes. And they'd need time to return the balls to the field, so let's say that's another 2 minutes. Then they'd need time to measure the pressure of the 24 footballs. Let's say it takes 15 seconds to measure and record the pressure of each football, for a total of 6 minutes. So let's add this up. The balls have to leave the indoor room for the field at 18 minutes into halftime, and they have to begin measuring the balls at 12 minutes into halftime, and so the balls would actually be inside the room at the correct temperature for only 10 minutes before their pressures are checked. Is that enough time? Certainly if the indoor temperature is 70 degrees and the outdoor temperature is 60 degrees, 10 minutes might be enough time. But what if the game is at night in January at Lambeau Field with an on-the-field temperature of -10 degrees. Is 10 minutes enough for the balls to warm up to 70 degrees? I very much doubt it. In fact I'll go out on a limb and unequivocally state that 10 minutes is not enough time for a football to warm up from -10 to 70 degrees. In other words, even after all the instructive lessons, the NFL still doesn't know what they're doing with respect to insuring correct football inflation pressures. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
One thing I've harped on constantly in this thread is the lack of fairness in the NFL processes and procedures as they relate to Deflategate. I felt that Goodell and company had treated Brady particularly unfairly during the arbitration process, and Judge Berman agreed, but not for the same reasons. He felt it unfair for what seem to me technical reasons, namely not providing adequate notice of consequences for football deflation and lack of cooperation (not handing over his cell phone), and not allowing Brady's lawyers to examine investigative notes or cross examine Pash.
I felt it unfair for different reasons. It seemed to me just generally unfair that Goodell appointed himself arbitrator, since he was not neutral, but I was wrong about that. Non-neutral arbitrators are allowed. It is arbitrators failing to behave impartially that are not allowed, because it violates the FAA. Legal analysts are saying that the NFL's loss of five consecutive appeals points out how difficult it is for non-neutral arbitrators to act impartially, and that the NFL must change its procedures. So it didn't violate the CBA when Goodell appointed himself as arbitrator for Brady's appeal. What it did was assign Goodell the Herculean task of behaving impartially in a case where he already had very strong opinions. Obviously he wasn't up to it. But what seemed most unfair to me was the assumption that there was any deflation at all. Even Judge Berman accepted that the Patriot footballs had been deflated before the start of the AFC game against the Colts. When a conclusion is reached from insufficient evidence, which is blatantly unfair, there is apparently no legal recourse. Judges are not permitted to reconsider findings based on evidence. What Judge Berman did was rule that the NFL had no policy that prohibited being "generally aware," nor any defined penalty for it. He also ruled that "Brady had no notice that he could receive a four-game suspension for general awareness of ball deflation by others or participation in any scheme to deflate footballs,..." What this means is that Goodell's arbitration finding stands. The NFL has ruled that Brady was at the center of a scheme to deflate footballs, and the federal appeals court ruling does not affect that. This seems very unfair, the most unfair thing of all in this unhappy mess. The court system, both civil and criminal, is strongly proscribed from reconsidering the evidence at each appeals level, and so appeals are focused on issues of process that might have affected the outcome. They rarely reconsider the evidence. There's incredible irony here. The appeals are being made based upon the belief that the evidence was incorrectly considered, yet they're not allowed to appeal on the evidence, so they have to appeal on the process. If a jury reaches a verdict of guilt because they accepted the testimony of a psychic who claimed to have "witnessed" the murder in a vision, an appeals court can't accept a challenge of that judgment, only a challenge based on the process used to reach that judgment. That's absurd, of course, but to allow the evidence to be reconsidered over and over again would mean justice never reaching any conclusions, which would be no justice at all. But episodes of jury decisions overturned by DNA evidence have mounted to considerable heights, and so we know that even in cases of the most heinous crimes of rape and murder where the stakes are high and considerable effort is made to avoid mistakes, nonetheless mistakes are made with disturbing frequency. And when the deciding entity is a non-neutral arbitrator the mistakes are going to be more obvious and more numerous. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NosyNed Member Posts: 9003 From: Canada Joined: |
... with a much more rational outcome.
Lewis Hamilton keeps Italian GP win after stewards' investigation - BBC Sport
Mercedes were investigated on the grounds the tyres were below the minimum permitted pressure. But the stewards allowed Hamilton to keep his victory after ruling Mercedes had followed safe operating procedures. ...in case of a penalty for the tyre pressure, which was 0.3psi lower than the minimum amount specified by Pirelli on safety grounds. ... But the stewards ruled that the tyres were at the correct temperature when fitted to the car and that the blankets which keep them warm were unplugged and at a lower temperature than the maximum permitted.... This lower temperature would mean the tyre lost pressure and would explain why it dipped below the minimum, which is why Mercedes were cleared of wrongdoing. Note: they actually understand a bit of physics and they measure so .3 psi is an issue.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
vimesey Member (Idle past 99 days) Posts: 1398 From: Birmingham, England Joined: |
I've been wondering about this - does it mean that the track officials are responsible for plugging in the blankets ?
Could there be any greater conceit, than for someone to believe that the universe has to be simple enough for them to be able to understand it ?
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NosyNed Member Posts: 9003 From: Canada Joined: |
does it mean that the track officials are responsible for plugging in the blankets ? No, I don't think so. It just means that the car had time to cool before the measurement was taken. I don't know what the measurement procedures are or when they are done. The driver is weighed in immediately after the race. The car is too at some point. The issue arose late in the race so I suspect that the tire pressures are measured before the race starts or they rely on telemetry (though that couldn't work during the race since the tires heat and cool drastically between corners and straights). What I am astonished by is that they pull 4 to 4.5 gs on the corners and on one corner at Monza 5.8 gs of deceleration! This is with the slower cars they are running now.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
It's been argued that Brady didn't actually want footballs at 12.5 psi but even lower, and that's why he ordered McNally to let a little air out of the footballs after the refs had already made sure the footballs were set at 12.5 psi.
But this makes no sense. On the road where the locker room attendants are provided by the host team Brady would have no one to perform the ball deflation. Believers in the supposed conspiracy must think that Brady is okay with footballs at a higher pressure for away games than for home games. And Brady never practices with balls set that low (according to the Wells report, Jastremski set the footballs to around 12.8 psi before the Jets game, and 12.6 psi after), so why would Brady ever want balls in a game set to an unfamiliarly low pressure? He wouldn't, of course. Brady says that when he selects the footballs for the game, in his mind they are perfect. Once he approves them he doesn't want anyone fiddling with the pressure or anything else. If he selects balls that are inflated outside the range then the refs will change them, and if someone tries to deflate them with a needle then they'll be changed again, and inaccurately, too. It's absurd to think that Brady would find all this fiddling with football pressure tolerable. What he wants is for the pressure to be set precisely to a low value within the acceptable range, because that guarantees that the refs won't change the pressure, and it means he'll get the same pressure both home and away. Earlier today an Italian high court threw out the convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Does anyone remember now the complicated story constructed by prosecutors? Just to mention a few things, Knox attacked Kercher in her bedroom, banged her head against a wall, and attempted to strangle her as part of a sex game gone wrong. Knox and Sollecito held Kercher down while another man (Guede) sexually abused her. They locked the bedroom door after the murder, but Sollecito broke back into the bedroom to clean up evidence (thereby explaining why the bedroom door was broken down). The story was incredibly detailed and complex and, according to the high court, completely fictional. The high court described the lower court verdicts using terms like "glaring errors" and "deplorable." The story in the Wells report about Brady, Jastremski and McNally was also incredibly detailed and complex, and just as fictional. A collection of sparse and inconclusive evidence can tell almost any story you like. This is not an easy lesson for prosecutors to learn, as the continuous trickle of innocent people out of our jails attests. I was once a witness to an assault, and I was surprised to learn how focused the prosecutor was on composing a story a grand jury would buy than on what actually happened. This was the trap that Wells and the NFL set for themselves and then fell into. The NFL has put in place new and flawed procedures for checking football pressure this season, and as we move into the lower temperatures of late fall and winter it will quickly be revealed just how difficult it is to check football pressures during a 20-minute halftime. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
Apparently we didn't get the full story in the news reports. According to sketch artist William J. Hennessy Jr. Brady was stomping across the tables:
No wonder Brady prevailed. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NoNukes Inactive Member |
Brady says that when he selects the footballs for the game, in his mind they are perfect. Once he approves them he doesn't want anyone fiddling with the pressure or anything else. If he selects balls that are inflated outside the range then the refs will change them, and if someone tries to deflate them with a needle then they'll be changed again, and inaccurately, too. The problem here is that there is no guarantee that the ball will stay at the same pressure after they are delivered to the referees. If the balls are inflated to 12.5 psig or dip to 12.4 psig on the referees guage, the referees might well decide to pump them up to the middle of the range or even higher depending on the weather outside. If the equipment managers see that, they might decide to make the balls "perfect" again. Obviously I cannot prove that this did or did not happen, but it is at least a scenario that ought to be considered when making the case that tampering with the footballs is ridiculous. Here is a quote from Tom Brady from back in 2011 that was widely reported during deflate gate
quote: Obviously there would be nothing illegal about using a deflated ball in the above instance and it is also obvious that Brady is joking around, but the statement does suggest that Brady does recognize a difference between a puffy ball and a flatter one and that he prefers the latter. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
NoNukes writes: The problem here is that there is no guarantee that the ball will stay at the same pressure after they are delivered to the referees. Right. After the Jets game they became very aware that the referees might change the pressure in the footballs. I'm sure they were aware of the possibility before, but after that game they became aware of how drastic the change in pressure might be. Concern about this possibility is what prompted all the text messages.
If the balls are inflated to 12.5 psig or dip to 12.4 psig on the referees guage, the referees might well decide to pump them up to the middle of the range or even higher depending on the weather outside. If the equipment managers see that, they might decide to make the balls "perfect" again. If I'm understanding you, you're positing a scenario where the Patriots deliver footballs inflated to the lowest possible pressure, 12.5 psi, to the referees, who use a different gauge and measure something below 12.5 psi, or perhaps the referees locker room is at a lower temperature and the pressure inside the footballs drops below 12.5 psi. Whatever the reason for the decrease in pressure, the referees decide to inflate any underinflated footballs to the middle of the range. And your further positing that the referees locker room attendant (i.e., McNally) might observe the referees pumping up the balls and so decide to deflate them on the way out to the field. According to the Wells report, the referee (Anderson) only pumped up two balls, and I could find no mention anywhere about whether he was observed by McNally while doing it.
Obviously I cannot prove that this did or did not happen, but it is at least a scenario that ought to be considered when making the case that tampering with the footballs is ridiculous. Of course it's a scenario that should be considered as long as it doesn't contradict other evidence, such as the AEI report demonstrating the unlikelihood that any deflation ever happened. Here's an interesting excerpt from the Wells Report:
quote: The "receiving permission" part and the "being accompanied by one of more officials" part are very interesting, because they're not actually in the NFL rules. The Wells report weaves a tale about officials never losing control of the balls in the past, but that doesn't align with the NFL rule book. All it says is that the footballs are under the supervision of the referees until they're turned over to the locker room attendant, nothing more. Here's the exact wording:
quote: Now maybe the referees had developed more rigorous procedures that had become their habit, but the rules say nothing about providing permission or accompanying the footballs to the field, and that wasn't the procedure the Patriot locker room attendant was familiar with. The Patriot report, The Wells Report in Context, makes that very clear. The Wells report was written in a way that implies the existence of rules that in actuality do not exist, and it then accuses the Patriot locker room attendant of violating them. It was a report commissioned by the NFL to tell the story the NFL wanted to hear. This year's rule changes regarding football security make clear how lax the NFL rules were regarding the handling of footballs, and one need only look at the old rule I quoted above and compare it to the new rules to understand this is so.
Obviously there would be nothing illegal about using a deflated ball in the above instance and it is also obvious that Brady is joking around, but the statement does suggest that Brady does recognize a difference between a puffy ball and a flatter one and that he prefers the latter. Yes, he was only joking, and yes, of course he can tell differences in ball pressure, but only when the pressure difference is around 2 psi or more (Belichick ran experiments with the quarterback crew). But you seem to be arguing that having a preference is some kind of evidence. It's not. It's innuendo, and all the NFL did was create a big a pile of innuendo that they tried to pass off as evidence. If innuendo is evidence, then here's Phil Simms quoting Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay's quarterback:
quote: So if stating that you like a pressure outside the range in the NFL rules is evidence of tampering, then the NFL should go after Rodgers. I'm sure if they examine all the text messages from last season of a dozen cell phones and interview dozens of people that they should have no trouble building a case. When it comes to the NFL, the slimmer the evidence the easier it is to weave a fantasy. But I think my earlier points rule out the possibility of tampering. Jastremski set ball pressures to around 12.8 psi until that October Jets game, and 12.6 psi after. These are the pressures Brady used for both practice and games. Brady would never practice with lower pressure balls during the week, or play with lower pressure balls on game day. It makes no sense that he would want unfamiliarly low pressure balls on game day, and the 8 home games would be the only time he'd have a chance of slipping low pressure footballs into games anyway. My own view is that McNally's responsibility was to make sure to tell the referees the desired pressure, and to attempt to stand nearby so he can let a referee know when he's set a football to the incorrect pressure. I don't know if an analogy to a sport other people are unfamiliar with will help, but anyway, I'm a tennis player. It's fun to hit with old balls (could be from yesterday or from last week or last month) because you have more time to prepare (they've lost pressure and lose more speed after the bounce) and you can hit them harder and they'll stay inside the court. Any good tennis player will have several old cans of balls in his bag just for something to pull out for the odd occasion, like arriving before anyone else and so pulling a few old balls out of the bag to hit some practice serves, or to hit against the wall (new balls come back off the wall too fast to be useful for practice (unless you're working on reaction time rather than strokes) and so old balls are better). But for rallying with someone across the net from you, even if it's just practice (in fact, especially if it's practice), it's important to use new balls because that's what you'll be using in a match, and you don't want to get used to the bounce and timing of old balls. If you've practiced with old balls then when you step onto the court for your match, which will be played with new balls, the first thing you'll notice is that the ball is almost by you before you can get your racket back. Anyone who's reached a high level in any sport should find it very difficult to believe that Brady would want anything as critical as football pressure to be different on game day from what it was during practice. In related news, the Patriots have submitted a formal request to the NFL for the reinstatement of Jastremski and McNally. Many people mistakenly interpret their indefinite suspension as an implicit admission of guilt by the Patriots, but in fact their suspension was ordered by the league in a letter from Troy Vincent to the Patriots organization. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0
|
See NFL will reinstate Patriots employees John Jastremski and Jim McNally.
Also, Patriots employees won’t face additional discipline from NFL. They're to meet with NFL VP of Football Operations Troy Vincent to discuss their roles, which will not involve the "preparing, handling or supervision of the team's game balls." Since this a team issue, rather than a player issue, I don't think there is any appeal about the restrictions. Rumor has it that McNally's replacement has chosen the nickname "The Drainer." --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0
|
In the wake of Berman's deflategate ruling and of headset communication problems at Gillette Stadium during the 2015 season's first game, additional complaints about Patriot cheating have been lodged in the media. Latest among them came from former NFL official Mark Baltz, a head linesman from 1989 to 2013. In an interview on WTHR this week he had this to say:
quote: I don't know where the "usual two minutes before the game" comes from. It is not in the NFL rules, which state:
quote: Baltz says he reported McNally to the league office:
quote: But former NFL supervisor of officials Jim Daopoulos provides a different story. Daopoulos was an NFL official for 11 years up until 2000, and a supervisor of officials (there are more than one at any given time, but I don't know how many) for 12 years until 2011. In an interview on Comcast SportsNet he had this to say:
quote: Play catch with Brady? What? If delivering the footballs to the field represented the end of McNally's duties for a while, one can understand his eagerness to get the footballs onto the field if it meant he might be able to play catch with Brady or otherwise hobnob with the team before they got down to the serious business of playing the game. Many sportscasters in New England believe there was something rotten going on, that Jastremski and McNally did conspire to and did actually deflate footballs, and many even believe Brady was involved. Most of the objections here are that the punishment was way out of proportion to the offense. But where is the evidence for football deflation? AEI's analysis points to errors in Exponent's analysis in the Wells Report, and correcting those errors concludes that likely no football inflation occurred (Exponent has a history of producing reports favorable to those paying them, see DeflateGate: NFL Hired Same Research Firm That Denied Secondhand Smoke Causes Cancer). The only evidence is suspicious text messages between Jastremski and McNally. So we're expected to believe a conspiracy to deflate footballs existed where:
Human communication, particular in contexts of familiarity, often involves inside humor, sarcasm, exaggeration, etc. The certainty some have of the precise meaning of the Jastremski/McNally texts ignores this. If the football pressures unequivocally led to the conclusion that football deflation happened then the culprits could only be Jastremski and McNally, since they're the only ones with motive and opportunity. But there would still be no hard evidence that they did it, and no evidence at all that Brady was involved. But forget all that, because the football pressure evidence says the opposite, that deflation likely didn't happen. Which makes sense, since if it did happen there would be more hard evidence that it did. The level of evidence for deflategate rises to the same level as most conspiracy theories: a bunch of innuendo constructed around ambiguous and incomplete evidence. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0
|
The NFL has requested an expedited hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals 2nd circuit, and the NFLPA has concurred. The timeline looks like this:
Some might have heard about Craig Carton's claim on WFAN radio that he'd been informed by a "very influential person in the NFL" that Brady would absolutely serve his four game suspension this season. Obviously that's impossible. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22490 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
In his podcast Ep. 2: DeflateGate, President Trump & MLB W/JackO Bill Simmons discusses Deflategate with JackO, aka John O'Connell, a very knowledgeable and articulate fan from Connecticut. Simmons comments on something I've seen no other commentator comment on, the inadvisability of turning over one's cell phone to the NFL:
quote: In his career Brady has earned over $162,000,000 from just football alone, and that doesn't include endorsements. Security is essential where that much money is concerned, and the NFL is not secure. As I said often in this thread, Brady should have under no circumstances turned his phone over to the NFL. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Omnivorous Member Posts: 3986 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.1
|
Percy writes: In his career Brady has earned over $162,000,000 from just football alone, and that doesn't include endorsements. Security is essential where that much money is concerned, and the NFL is not secure. As I said often in this thread, Brady should have under no circumstances turned his phone over to the NFL. Barring a court order, I'd destroy my phone before handing it over to any demanding authority, especially a hostile corporate one. I'd laugh at suspicions supposedly based on my desire for privacy. I hope Brady does. Besides, I know the media lust for my selfies."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads." Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.-Terence
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.5
|
Again, the Brady family has a lot to lose. Think the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping. How much ransom could a kidnapper ask for? Want to know when the kids are getting picked up from school? Where they are on a regular basis?
- xongsmith, 5.7d
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024