Deflation-gate

Yesterday I came across a couple articles with a little different information:

• NFL bears plenty of blame for #DeflateGate
  
• One Unanswered Question Is The Key To The Patriots' Deflated-Ball Scandal

The first article contains this little nugget: Various reports have contained mildly conflicting information, but this is the first time the possibility has been raised that it wasn't eleven balls that were 2 psi underflated but one. The others were only around 1 pound underinflated. And what pressure did the ideal gas law yield for a drop in temperature from 72^o to 45^o? 11.12 psi.Remember that reports seemed to agree that the Colts balls had checked out in range at halftime, but that's not possible. If they'd been originally inflated to 13.5 psi at 72^o, then at halftime at 45^o they would have been at 12.12 psi and out of range. The reports are either incorrect or the Colts balls were originally overinflated.The other significant point in the articles was the way the NFL has mismanaged this. Quoting the first article again: I am not claiming the Patriots did nothing wrong. One part of what I am saying is an expression of my dismay over not just the lack of knowledge and awareness of the effects of climatic conditions on ball pressure, but in some quarters of actual rejection of them.But more importantly I am saying that the evidence for drawing any conclusions is not yet publicly available, and that anyone who is drawing conclusions is doing so out of their own biases. If the Patriots are guilty I will condemn them along with everyone else, but they can only be found guilty by evidence, not public opinion.One clarifying comment about how I'll feel if it turns out to be a rogue ball attendant: I won't know what to think. Was he really rogue, or is he just taking the blame for the organization? Even if he was genuinely rogue, how much blame should the organization bear for that? I don't have answers at this time.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar, wordsmithing.

Article: DeflateGate broken down by MIT physics professor, says Bill Belichick, Tom Brady should be innocent until proven guiltyGee, what a novel thought. The MIT professor says he's dismayed that the NFL went to Columbia for physics tutoring: Not only is Columbia the JV of physics, they can't keep a secret, either. The professor goes on to say he understands that they may have avoided MIT because it's located in the center of Patriots fandom. Where the Columbia professors erred he correctly comments on the influence of climatic conditions: He refreshingly concludes: --Percy

One NFL leak reported that the Patriot ball attendant disappeared into a small bathroom for 90 seconds. It's alleged that that's where the deflation must have occurred.I took a football and an inflation needle attached to a hose. I placed my football on the counter to my right and started my stopwatch. I took the football and placed it in front of me, stuck the needle in for somewhere around 1 or 2 seconds, removed the needle, then replaced the football to my right. I did this a total of 11 times. Total duration: 76 seconds, or 14 seconds less than the 90 seconds the attendant spent in the bathroom.Since in my experiment there was only one football, and since it was always in the correct orientation, I never had to rotate it to find the inflation hole. Since it was only one football, I never had to find room for 11 more footballs. The football never rolled around, fell off the counter, or moved in any way other than when I moved it myself.If the ball attendant deflated the footballs, which are kept in a duffel bag, then he needed to take no more than 1 or 2 seconds to actually adjust the pressure, and he could not have taken more than 14 seconds to open the duffel bag, remove the footballs, and put them back in the duffel bag. It took me 15 seconds to mimic the motion of removing a football from a duffel bag 11 times. Naturally since there was no actual football involved, no football ever slipped out of my hands, fell on the floor, or whatever else is possible.11 footballs in 90 seconds? He must be very good.Of course, the ball attendant could have followed a different process. Once in the bathroom he could have opened the duffel bag, knelt beside it, then reaching into the duffel bag and grabbing each football consecutively pulled it to the opening, deflated it, then let it go and grabbed the next. It would have been difficult for him to keep track of which footballs he deflated while they were still in the bag, though he apparently missed only one. I couldn't run any experiments on this scenario because I don't have a duffel bag and I don't have twelve footballs.--Percy

This information must be considered as potentially unreliable as any other information, but amongst all the Superbowl coverage yesterday I did hear a couple times of a report that the ball attendant who disappeared into the bathroom was an older gentleman, and that it was 98 seconds, not 90.--Percy

While the NFL and lawyer/investigator Ted Wells decline comment until the investigation is complete, yesterday saw yet another leak, this one via Adam Schefter (see Adam Schefter: NFL Official Responsible For Tampering With AFC Championship Balls [VIDEO]). This leak is not about the playing balls, but about the special teams balls, the ones used for kickoffs, field goals and punts. Keeping in mind that there is still no way to judge the accuracy of the information, here is a summary of what Schefter said from the cited article: There's a problem with this account that needs to be pointed out. The account says that one official removed a special teams ball from the field, a ball that has the special mark added when it is checked by officials prior to the game. When this official realized that another official had noticed that a ball was missing, the first official retrieved the ball he had taken and handed it to Patriots game-day employee Jim McNally. But the official who noticed the ball was missing also retrieved a ball and handed it to McNally. It's impossible that both of these balls had the special approval mark, and it's also possible that neither had the mark.This raises a couple questions:

• Why would an NFL field official, who knows that he can't introduce an unapproved ball into the game, do this?
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• Why would NFL officials hand balls to McNally, who as an officials' locker room attendant doesn't have ball handling responsibilities during a game?

Adam Schefter is a highly respected sports reporter. He is usually very careful to get things right. He may only be passing on information as it was given to him without trying to address the questionable aspects. So I'm not trying to cast aspersions at Schefter when I say that this story doesn't add up. There's no way to know which parts are true, which parts are false, and what information is missing. Unfortunately we're not going to know the full story until the Wells report is released, and perhaps not even then.--Percy

An NBC Sports article provides a clear (though who knows how accurate) description of events concerning the special teams ball (or kicking ball) that was removed from the AFC championship game: Patriots alerted NFL to issue with special-teams ballThe gist of the article is that NFL employee Scott Miller removed the ball marked "K1" from the game after the Patriots' game opening kickoff. The Patriots later noticed the ball was missing, apparently because (and I'm filling in the blanks here) Patriots kicker Stephen Gostowski liked the way "K1" had been prepped and later couldn't find it for the extra point after the Patriots' first touchdown. The Patriots alerted game officials, and Scott Miller brought a ball back, which is captured on video. Video later shows Patriots employee Jim McNally giving a football to game officials. Presumably its the same ball Scott Miller brought back on the field, but no video actually shows Miller giving a ball to McNally. The report doesn't state whether the returned ball said "K1", but presumably it did, otherwise there would be more to the story since Stephen Gostowski would have complained, "No, that's not the ball I prepped."The article sagely concludes: --Percy

This thing about the kicking balls is actually an unrelated issue that just happened to come to light during the deflate-gate investigation. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, I don't think anything's going to help the Patriots' reputation. The public reaction to deflate-gate ties in to the debate here in that it highlights the way in which many people just believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence either way. The evidence isn't publicly known yet, we don't even know if it was 11 balls or 1 ball, but many have already made up their minds.I wonder if Wells feels any conflict of interest. His job is to determine if the Patriots' organization engaged in any wrongdoing, but he's employed by the NFL, so if all his investigation reveals is the NFL's resemblance to the Keystone Cops then what will he do?--Percy

My comment was about the entire Wells investigation, not just the latest leak, but there's delicious irony here. While investigating the Patriots for manipulating footballs the NFL only uncovers misconduct by one of its own employees (this is what we know for sure so far). Combined with the Ray Rice affair and all the rest, this has been a very bad twelve months for the NFL. Given that he's employed by the NFL it seems entirely fair to speculate on whether Wells feels conflicted about producing a report that puts the NFL in a bad light yet again.--Percy

Here's the Faux Wells Report.--Percy

According to an article at ESPN, Wells has concluded his investigation and is now writing his report.--Percy

I wanted to read the full Wells report before posting any comments, but the Wells report is 143 pages and I'm a bit tied up at present, so I'll make a few brief comments now and reading the Wells report will have to wait. At his point I've only read a couple brief newspaper articles. It'll be interesting to see if my opinions change at all after reading the report.

• Brady Knew
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  Tom Brady didn't underinflate the footballs himself, but he knew and must be held accountable. He has to hold a press conference where he must come clean and tell the full truth, including why he didn't make his cell phone data available to Wells. Anything short of that will be a significant blot on his career.
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• Brady Must Be Punished
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  The NFL must issue Brady a stern punishment. I think a 4-game suspension seems reasonable, but one could argue that the sheer arrogance, the abject disdain of NFL rules, the baldfaced public lies, deserve something more, and I could understand an argument for a full season suspension.
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• There Must Be Firings
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  The two men responsible evidently felt they were in a battle with referees over ball pressure. It is apparent they felt that Patriot ball pressure requests were being ignored, indeed flagrantly and contemptuously so to judge by the language in their texts, and so they felt it reasonable to remedy this injustice by adjusting the ball pressure before the balls were delivered to the field. Whatever their rationale, they must be fired.
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• The Patriot Organization Must Be Punished
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  While apparently no one outside of Brady and these two men were involved, the Patriot organization is responsible for management and oversight and must accept full responsibility. They said they were cooperating fully with the investigation, yet they allowed Brady to keep his cell phone data private. I think a fine of $5,000,000 and the loss of their first round pick for the next three years is appropriate.
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• What About the Inflation Evidence?
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  Most of my interest in this stemmed from puzzlement bordering on disbelief that there could be so little awareness of how much temperature can affect football pressure, but I saw nothing in the two newspaper articles I read about how many footballs were actually underinflated and by how much. I'll have to wait until I read the Wells report to find out.

More after I read the Wells report.--Percy

Granted.I of course still haven't read the Wells Report, but I know Brady as well as any average fan can know him, having followed his career since he first broke into prominence in 2001. He's hypercompetitive. He could easily see this not as an issue of honesty and integrity but as just another battle to be won. Moments that come to mind are his treatment of the mother of his first child (paraphrasing, "Things happen in life..."), his treatment of an opposing coach's attempt to make generous comments after defeating the Patriots (paraphrasing, "He doesn't know our team, he should shut his face..."), and the shoot-em-up at his wedding (paraphrasing, "Nothing to do with me, not my fault..."). I think his defensive mechanisms and competitive nature get his dander up and submerge his moral side.Not sharing texts and emails looks really bad. I assume it was on advice of counsel, but still...He is by all accounts a wonderful guy, but so, supposedly, were Bing Crosby and Joan Crawford. Who really knows?--Percy

The Patriot organization today issued a response (The Wells Report in Context) to the NFL's Wells report. I haven't had time to read the voluminous Wells Report and so haven't read this response, either, but I did scan through the first few pages, and one thing stood out.The Wells Report didn't properly factor together two closely related issues: two different pressure gauges giving two different readings, and the effect of temperature on ball pressure. This surprised me. There seems to have been plenty of time to get this right.Concerning what I said earlier about what the punishments should be, if Brady and the Patriots are guilty then I stand by that. But I was relying on news reports and assuming that those reporting on the Wells report had read it. I assumed that if the evidence didn't support the conclusions that those who had read the report would have said so, and I interpreted the local media's questioning of the report as knee-jerk homerism. Now it seems possible that the national media placed too much reliance on the reports conclusions and paid not enough attention to the evidence itself. I should have remembered that terms like "Ideal Gas Law" put most sports reporters into a catatonic trance.Brady's going to challenge the findings and it should be a hell of a fight. Get your popcorn ready.Goodell may want to begin cleaning up his resume.--Percy

I'm never going to find enough time to read everything, so I decided to look at just the parts of the Wells Report related to ball pressure. There were two known pressure gauges mentioned in the Wells Report, the Logo gauge (has the Wilson logo on it), and the Non-Logo gauge (no logo). The two gauges report pressures that are between .3-.5 psi different. On page 51 the Wells reports states that Anderson could not be certain which gauge he used: The report goes on to say that Anderson made sure the inflation pressure in all the balls was 12.5 to 12.6 psi.There was an interception of a Brady pass by the Colts in the 1st half, and it's pressure was tested with yet a third gauge, or possibly one of the two gauges mentioned previously: How much below 12.0 psi it doesn't say, but if the ball was originally inflated to 12.5 psi at 71°F, then when cooled to 48°F the pressure would have been 11.33 psi, or approximately 1.2 psi less.At halftime referees Blakeman and Prioleau used the Logo and Non-Logo gauges to measure the pressure of the remaining 11 Patriot footballs in the dressing area of the Officials Locker Room (the same room where they were originally inflated), obtaining these results. In parenthesis I've placed the change from 12.5 psi: They next tested 4 Colts footballs, which were originally inflated to 13.0 psi. In parenthesis I've placed the change from 13.0 psi: Obviously the Colt footballs could no longer have been at field temperature, because if they were then they would have tested 1.2 psi below 13.0 psi, or 11.8 psi and outside the valid range of 12.5-13.5 psi. But they were also not at room temperature, otherwise they would have tested right around their original inflation pressure of 13.0 psi.But the Patriot footballs were tested first and would have been closer to field temperature, and so would have measured at a lower pressure. If they had originally been inflated with the Logo gauge, then the average of the Logo gauge measurements at halftime is 11.49 psi, pretty much what you would expect for balls originally inflated to 12.5 psi at 71°F, cooled to 48°F, then returned to a 71°F environment and measured while they gradually warmed up.But there's more. If we designate the Logo gauge as the standard, and if the Patriot footballs were originally inflated using the Non-Logo gauge, then the Patriot footballs were actually originally inflated to around 12.15 psi, not 12.5 psi, and now the decrease in pressure at halftime becomes much closer to the Colts footballs. The decrease in pressure is still greater than the Colts footballs, but again, the Patriot footballs were measured first and would have been colder.Another factor to consider. If we assume tampering, then how much tampering was there. If we completely leave out of the equation the temperature of the balls to get an idea of the maximum amount of air that might have been removed from the balls, the answer is around .65 psi. Seems too small an amount to be worth worrying about.The standard the NFL uses is "a preponderance of the evidence," not "beyond a reasonable doubt". Do these factors tip the scales against a preponderance of the evidence? I don't know. I think that how everyone weighs the evidence in their minds will differ. But what *is* a fact is that reasonable scenarios exist that explain all the evidence and that don't involve tampering.--Percy

Only when not specified otherwise in a civil agreement. The Commissioner’s Policy on Integrity of the Game specifies "preponderance of the evidence" as its standard. It could have specified "beyond a reasonable doubt" as its standard, but it didn't, so I made that clear."Preponderance of the evidence" is a way of making decisions in the face of inconclusive data, making it mostly a matter of opinion. It turns out that hard evidence is absent and even the circumstantial evidence is slight, but many people have no problem drawing conclusions anyway.A lot of this feels eerily similar to what happened to the New Orleans Saints and Bountygate, or to Richie Incognito formerly of the Miami Dolphins. Text messages and emails communicate a great deal more than the words alone appear to say and often lend themselves to broad misinterpretation by those seeking data to draw a bullseye around.--Percy