Deflategate

The NFL, particularly over the past season, has come under fire by many people due to their failure to conduct successful investigations and giving out fair punishments. Ray Rice, after beating his then Fiance unconscious and dragging her unconscious body out of an elevator,  was given a 2 game suspension. Josh Gordon, who tested positive for marijuana, was suspended for the rest of the season. The NFL gave Josh Gordon a harsher penalty than an individual who knocked his fiance out cold. This did not make sense to me, or any other logical person who follows the league. The "deflategate" scandal, is yet another failed attempt by the NFL to conduct a successful investigation. To start, lets forget the assumptions, and look at the facts.

To investigate this matter, the NFL hired Ted Wells, who has investigated other matters in the league such as the Richie Incognito bullying incident. For the scientific part of the investigation, Ted Wells employed the California-based engineering firm, Exponent. Exponent is hardly credible. In fact, an article in the Los Angeles Times in 2010 criticized the firm claiming "Exponent's research has come under fire from critics, including engineers, attorney's and academics who say the company tends to deliver to clients the reports they need to mount a public defense." Exponent had also once claimed that secondhand smoke did not lead to cancer, which has since been debunked and proven wrong.

Now lets get into the actual findings of the investigation. The testing of the PSI in the footballs were done with two different pressure gauges. It is hard to know the actual PSI of each football because of the varied readings of the two pressure gauges. The same footballs were getting different readings by each pressure gauge, some being as varied as almost 0.5 PSI. The NFL tested every Patriots football but failed to test every Colts football. Only 4 of the Colts footballs were tested. Interestingly, 3 of the 4 Colts footballs that were with one of the gauges, were under the league minimum of 12.5 PSI. The NFL, who read and reviewed the Wells report saw this, but ignored that fact. The discrepancies between the two gauges failed to obtain an accurate reading of the PSI's of the footballs. Therefore, it is a fact that an accurate reading of the PSI's for each football was never obtained and not known. It is also a fact that atmospheric pressure deflates air pressure in footballs during football games. There have been many credible scientific sources, such as MIT, who have backed that atmospheric pressure alone could have deflated the footballs to the state where they were inaccurately gauged at halftime. Dale Syphers, a college physics professor, stated that atmospheric pressure alone could have dropped the pressure by almost 1.5 PSI. And that does not account for the almost 300 Lbs. players who are falling on top of the football on almost every play and also does not account for the fact that it was raining that day which can lead to a significant decrease in air pressure.

The punishment that the Patriots received for "Deflategate" was completely unwarranted considering their lack of evidence. The footballs are inflated by the refs before the game and then given to the ball boy who then takes them to the field. In the Wells report, the ball boy who took the balls to the field was given the footballs and went into the bathroom for one minute before going onto the field. If the NFL thinks that the ball boy went into the bathroom and deflated those 11 footballs in a mere 60 seconds, then they really are as bad at administering punishments as we all think they are. That would mean that the ball boy deflated each football by 1 PSI in less than 10 seconds. That would be a nearly impossible feat. A ball boy in 60 seconds could deflate two, maybe 3 footballs in that time. But there is no way 11 is even possible. The Wells report itself is not a reliable source of information for the NFL to be using. The Wells report itself states on page 228 that the investigation is "based on assumptions and information that is not certain." The conclusions were based on probabilities and at no point was there a definitive conclusion. The NFL, although, believed it warranted a $1,000,000 fine, the largest in NFL history, the loss of two draft picks, and a 4 game suspension for the Super Bowl MVP. There are teams that have been caught red handed cheating that didn't come close to that punishment. The Chargers putting stickum on their towels, the Falcons piping in crowd noise, the Browns texting team information on the sideline during games, and the Vikings heating up footballs with the heated bench during games.