When Tom Brady announced his retirement last week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement thanking Brady “for his many contributions to our game.”
Whether Goodell ever issues a statement apologizing to Brady for Deflategate remains to be seen, but a new report from Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio sheds even more light on just how ridiculous the NFL’s approach to that whole saga was.
In an article posted Sunday night, Florio shares two interesting Deflategate nuggets he uncovered while doing research for his new book, Playmakers.
One relates to air-pressure checks of footballs conducted league-wide throughout the 2015 season, the season following the AFC championship game against the Colts in which the Patriots’ footballs were allegedly underinflated.
The results of those 2015 tests were never made public. According to Florio, they no longer even exist. He reports via a source that the league expunged the numbers on the direct order of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash.
Florio adds that the psi numbers for games played in cold weather came in “too close to the actual numbers generated by the New England footballs at halftime of the playoff game against the Colts.” That would provide a good incentive for the NFL to bury the results given that they were still fighting Brady in court at the time. Brady would ultimately give up the legal fight and serve his suspension during the 2016 season.
Goodell has said in the past that the spot checks were not done to collect data, but rather to simply make sure teams weren’t altering footballs. Of course, it’s convenient to say it was never about the data if the data contradicts your narrative. If it supported the NFL’s case, why wouldn’t they share it?
The other nugget from Florio is in regards to Chris Mortensen’s report that 11 of the Patriots’ 12 balls were underinflated by at least two pounds each, which came a couple days after the AFC championship game and really sent the whole story into hyperdrive. The report was ultimately proven to be inaccurate -- only one ball was two pounds under, and only on one of the two gauges used -- but that didn’t come until the league’s investigation was already underway.
Mortensen never revealed his source for that report, but Florio reports it was Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations. Florio adds that it is unclear whether Vincent deliberately lied to Mortensen or if he believed he had the correct numbers at the time.
Vincent would ultimately author the May 2015 announcement of Brady’s suspension, which stated in part that “there is substantial and credible evidence to conclude you [Brady] were at least generally aware of the actions of the Patriots' employees involved in the deflation of the footballs and that it was unlikely that their actions were done without your knowledge.”
Vincent later confirmed during an appeal hearing that he had never heard of the ideal gas law -- which explains why a football, like a car tire, would lose air pressure in cold weather -- before the league launched its investigation, admitting, “I didn’t include science.”
Vincent not taking science into account early on would explain how he started with the assumption that Brady and the Patriots must have done something wrong, and it might explain why he decided to leak the (inaccurate) psi numbers to Mortensen.
Combined with the report that the NFL destroyed the results of the 2015 spot checks, it paints a picture of a league that had its mind made up before the investigation even started and was determined not to budge, even if science and its own collected data suggested their initial premise -- that Brady must have tampered with the balls -- was off base.
Seven years later, they still have not budged. Goodell has dodged questions during past Super Bowl weeks when asked if he still believes suspending Brady was the right thing to do. Florio says the league did not respond to two separate emails about his new findings.
Perhaps Goodell will be asked again this Super Bowl week.
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