On Sunday night, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio reported two newsworthy Deflategate nuggets he gathered while working on his new book, Playmakers.
One of them was that, according to his source, the NFL expunged the results of spot-checks it conducted on game balls throughout the 2015 season -- the season after Tom Brady and the Patriots allegedly used underinflated balls in the AFC championship game against the Colts.
According to Florio, this was done on the direct order of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash. He adds that the drop in air pressure in balls used in cold-weather games was similar to the drop in air pressure in the Patriots’ balls used in the AFC championship game, which would provide the motive for the NFL to destroy the results.
Florio joined The Greg Hill Show on Monday morning to discuss his report and said that if the NFL had released those 2015 numbers, it would have woken everyone up to the fact that this kind of drop in air pressure was common and could easily be explained by science (specifically, the ideal gas law).
“They had never done this before. They had never tested whether or not there were deviations beyond the 12.5-to-13.5-pound acceptable pressure range, a number that’s just always been there and no one knows why it’s been there,” Florio said. “But hey, if somebody’s beyond it and we decide we want to whack them, we’re gonna go whack them.
“Well they checked, and they realized that you take the footballs out of the locker room, you take them out on the field, and on a hot day, the pressure’s going up; on a cold day, the pressure’s going down. The numbers were sufficiently close on the cold days to cause someone, specifically Jeff Pash, to say when the season ended, ‘Get rid of these numbers.’ Throughout this, somebody always leaks something when it relates to the NFL. Usually it’s because the NFL wants to get it out, so they find a way to leak it.
“This is something the NFL did not want to get out. No one ever had access to these numbers. They managed to protect those numbers. Then when they got to the end of the season, the order was given to get rid of them forever, which justifiably leads to the conclusion that if we had seen those numbers, the light bulbs would’ve gone off coast-to-coast. Look, the [John] Jastremski and [Jim] McNally texts were problematic. They suggested that maybe something was going. That’s one thing. It’s not proof that it actually happened on the day that they claimed it happened.
“I don’t think they ever had the proof that it happened that day. They started at the end point and forced their way backward as clumsily as they had to to justify their conclusion that on that day, they caught the Patriots in the act. It’s entirely possible that Brady, Jastremski and McNally had something going on from time to time, but on that day, they didn’t catch them. They’ve been trying to sell for seven years now that they did.”
Listen to the full interview with Florio here:
