Other New Patriots Scandal - DeflateGate

[Exe Gesis]

Report: NFL investigating deflated football Steelers used Thursday night
Posted by Michael David Smith on August 10, 2018, 5:51 AM EDT

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Has Deflategate come to the preseason?

The NFL is investigating after the Steelers were using a deflated football during the third quarter of Thursday night’s preseason game against the Eagles, according to Howard Eskin of WIP.

Eskin, who was working the game as the sideline reporter on the Eagles’ broadcast, said he saw the football in question and it was “like a marshmallow.”

The incident took place during the third quarter while Mason Rudolph was playing quarterback for the Steelers, according to Eskin.

In the AFC Championship Game in January of 2015, the NFL concluded that the Patriots had used a deflated football. After a lengthy investigation, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was given a four-game suspension and the Patriots were docked two draft picks and fined $1 million. Whether the NFL would pour similar resources into investigating a deflated football thrown by a backup quarterback in a preseason game remains to be seen.

 

[juice t]

The Steelers have increased their efforts to be more like the Pats

 

[Exe Gesis]

From Playmakers: NFL general counsel Jeff Pash ordered expungement of 2015 air-pressure measurements​

Posted by Mike Florio on February 6, 2022, 9:45 PM EST

The past week has been a rocky ride for the NFL. The past 20 years have featured plenty of bumps, too. One of the biggest came in 2015, which began with the allegation that the Patriots had used deflated footballs during the first half of the AFC Championship.

Playmakers, my new book (buy early, buy often) containing more than 100 essays regarding various events and issues and controversies in the NFL from 2001 through 2020, devotes a chapter to the saga known as Deflategate. And while pretty much everything that could be told about the situation was told about it at the time, I managed to stumble over a couple of intriguing pieces of information while putting the book together.

First, let’s take a closer look at the development that caused Deflategate to mushroom from a curiosity into a firestorm. It came from Chris Mortensen of ESPN, who reported that 11 of 12 footballs used by the New England offense during the game against the Colts were underinflated by at least two pounds each.

The information was eventually shown to be false. Mort took the bullet for it, never complaining or calling out his source. (In fact, he clung to the discredited information for months, before his original item at ESPN.com was “clarified” with an acknowledgement that the initial report was incorrect.)

So who was his source? Per a source with knowledge of the situation and as explained in Playmakers, the source for the notorious 11-of-12 footballs report was NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent.

It makes sense. It needed to be someone sufficiently high on the organizational chart to make it credible, and to prompt Mortensen to use it, despite the fact that (unbeknownst to Mortensen) it wasn’t true. It’s unclear whether Vincent deliberately lied to Mortensen. Things were muddled and hazy and confusing in the early days of the scandal.

Regardless, the report from Mortensen immediately put the Patriots and quarterback Tom Brady on the defensive, setting the stage for Brady’s incredible (and definitely not-credible) press conference just a few days later. (Among other things, Brady was asked if he’s a cheater. His decidedly unconvincing response was, “I don’t believe so.”)

Second, there was an important P.S. to Deflategate. One that received scant attention in the aftermath of the scandal, in large part because that’s what the league wanted.

Beginning with the 2015 season, the NFL began conducting air-pressure spot-checks at halftime of games. The numbers were collected and protected, with none of the information ever coming to light.

It was expected that, given the operation of the Ideal Gas Law, the pressure inside the balls would rise on warm days, and that it would fall on cold days. That’s exactly what happened. As the source put it, “numerous” measurements made at halftime of games during the 2015 season generated numbers beyond the permitted range of 12.5 to 13.5 psi, with the reading showing a direct correlation between temperature and air pressure.

On cold days, pressure readings taken before the balls were moved to the field resulted in lower readings after 90 minutes of exposure to the conditions. On hot days, the pressure increased.

Indeed, it was believed that the actual numbers measured in the footballs used by the Patriots were generally consistent with the numbers that the atmospheric conditions should have generated that day. This should have resulted in a finding that, at most, the evidence was inconclusive as to whether there had been deliberate deflation on the day in question.

The formula for the Ideal Gas Law goes like this: PV = nRT. The “T” is temperature, the “P” is pressure, and the “V” is volume. As the temperature drops and the volume of air in the bladder remains constant, the pressure necessarily drops.

So what happened to those numbers from the 2015 season? Per a source with knowledge of the situation, and as reported in Playmakers, the NFL expunged the numbers. It happened at the direct order, per the source, of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash.

Why would the league delete the numbers? It’s simple. For cold days, the numbers were too close to the actual numbers generated by the New England footballs at halftime of the playoff game against the Colts. Which means that the numbers generated at halftime of the January 2015 AFC Championship were not evidence of cheating, but of the normal operation of air pressure inside a rubber bladder when the temperature drops. Just as it was expected.

We’d always believed the Patriots and Brady got screwed. While something fishy was indeed happening, based on the text messages exchanged by John Jastremski and Jim McNally, the NFL failed to catch them in the act. The NFL failed to catch them in the act because the measurements made at halftime of the Colts-Patriots game were not out of line with what they should have been.

The numbers harvested during the 2015 season corroborated this. Which would provide a clear motivation to make those numbers go away, for good. Which is exactly what Pash ordered.

During the drafting process of Playmakers, I sent two separate emails to the NFL giving them an opportunity to respond to both aspects of this report. The NFL did not reply to either message.

So there’s the last word on Deflategate, as harvested in the process of drafting Playmakers. The effort to test the operation of air pressure in footballs in the season played after the game in question (an effort the NFL had never before undertaken) resulted in numbers that were inconveniently similar to the numbers haphazardly collected in a game of “gotcha” that was instigated against the Patriots. Thus, those numbers never saw — and never will see — the light of day. The NFL made sure of that.

This article is based on information taken from Playmakers: How the NFL Really Works (And Doesn’t) by Mike Florio ©2022. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. You can (and should) order it here.

 

[Exe Gesis]

Roger Goodell: I don’t know what happened to the data from 2015 air pressure spot-checks​

Posted by Josh Alper on February 9, 2022, 4:30 PM EST

An excerpt from Mike Florio’s forthcoming book Playmakers posted to PFT on Tuesday looked at some aspects of Deflategate, notably what happened when the league performed spot-checks on the air pressure of footballs around the league during games in 2015.

The results of those checks were never revealed, but a source told Florio that the results were consistent with the assumption that pressure would increase in hot temperatures and decrease on colder days. Those findings were also consistent with the findings in footballs used by the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game win over the Colts that touched off the entire investigation.

That outcome calls into question the punishments handed down to the Patriots and Tom Brady and Florio’s source contends the findings were expunged by NFL general counsel Jeff Pash. At a Wednesday press conference, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked if that was the case and he said he didn’t know the answer.
“We were very clear that we were going to do spot-checks to make sure people were following the policies,” Goodell said. “That is something we fully engaged in and I don’t know what happened to the data, to be honest with you. We don’t look back at that. We just make sure there’s no violations. That is the purpose of the spot-checks. Are there violations? And if there are violations we look into it. Thankfully, we did not see any.”

It’s hard to imagine the results of the spot-checks would have remained out of sight if they backed up discipline for what happened in the AFC title game and that, in turn, makes it easier to believe that the decision to keep them under wraps was made because of the opposite conclusion.

 

[Exe Gesis]

Roger Goodell’s non-answer on 2015 air-pressure spot checks says everything​

Posted by Mike Florio on February 10, 2022, 10:59 AM EST


After the folks at Hachette foolishly offered me a book deal, my editor, Ben Adams, issued a simple challenge. While piecing together a puzzle of more than 100 controversies, incidents, stories, etc. that taken together tell the story of the NFL as a successful-despite-itself business concern over the past 20 years, try to find some new information that previously hasn’t been reported.

So I did. And it worked, as well as it could for a stream of high-profile stories that were covered extensively as they happened.

Deflategate ended up being fairly fertile ground, to my surprise. As Playmakers reports (and as we strategically released at the start of Super Bowl week because, you know, capitalism), the 2015 air-pressure spot checks performed by the NFL during halftime of various games were permanently expunged at the direction of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash.

The news had the intended reaction, especially in Boston. It tends to vindicate the Patriots, obviously. If the numbers had supported the NFL’s punishment of the team and quarterback Tom Brady, they would have been spoon fed to Schefty five minutes or so before being plastered all over NFL.com. The fact that the numbers never saw the light of day means that a comparison of those numbers to the numbers harvested in Deflategate would have prompted people to say, “Where’s the proof of cheating?”

Then came Wednesday, the occasion of the Commissioner’s annual pre-Super Bowl press conference. Of the various tough questions that the $65 million-per-year pin cushion fielded, Ben Volin of the Boston Globe asked Roger Goodell about our important Deflategate P.S.

“I don’t know what happened to the data, to be honest with you,” Goodell said. “We don’t look back at that. We just make sure there’s no violations. That is the purpose of the spot checks. Are there violations? And if there are violations we need to look into it. But thankfully we did not see any.”

Yes, they saw no violations. They saw no violations because the air pressure inside the balls behaved as it should when the temperature rises (higher pressure) or drops (lower pressure). And the evidence of no violations regarding the spot checks, when compared to the numbers taken from the footballs used by the Patriots during the first half of the 2014 AFC Championship, would have prompted many to conclude that there was no violation there, either.
This doesn’t mean that something fishy wasn’t happening. The text messages exchanged by New England football flunkies Jastremski and McNally were damning. Brady’s explanation for the destruction of his phone was borderline laughable. However, if this was about proof of cheating on the day that the league office decided to swarm over the team’s football, there was no such proof.

The spot checks would have proven that. Thus, the numbers generated by the spot checks were examined, retained for a bit, and then destroyed — despite the fact that there was pending litigation at the time regarding the Brady suspension. (And, yes, this potentially could be characterized as obstruction of justice by an ambitious prosecutor looking to take on Big Shield.)

Maybe Goodell truly doesn’t know “what happened” to the data, in the sense of he doesn’t know whether it was deleted from a hard drive, crushed in a thumb drive, or flushed down a toilet. Regardless, he knows that it’s gone for good. That’s the point.

By saying “I don’t know what happened to the data,” he admitted that it’s gone. It’s gone because they wanted it to be gone. Goodell’s implicit admission to that effect proves that it was affirmatively erased.

Why is it relevant now? It’s relevant because the information about the league deleting the information was published now. And we never would have known about the ultimate vindication of the Patriots as to the 2014 AFC Championship if Ben Adams hadn’t nudged me to find some new information for Playmakers.