#DFG: Canceling the Noise
- Thread starter nattysez
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Not only that, but what is it about the NFL that has created this culture of crybabies?LuckyBen said:
When Bonds was breaking Babe Ruth's record were the Dodgers calling for an investigation that he might be using PEDs? When the Lakers were dominating during the late 90s early 00s were the Sacramento Kings calling for a league investigation in potential salary cap violations? It's insane.
djbayko said:
Doesn't really change anything. They'd have criticized him for not giving them much to go on and it's basically the same situation as if he refused outright.
Ed Hillel said:
Yes. They could find it "more probable than not" that he was lying, because it is unlikely that Brady, who was a "catalyst" based on "most plausible" reading of the text exchanges, would not have reached out to discuss the issue. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
That's why this portion of the report rings so hollow:
"[W]e offered to allow Brady‟s counsel to screen and control the production so that it would be limited strictly to responsive materials and would not involve our taking possession of Brady‟s telephone or other electronic devices."
If counsel "screens and controls" the production, and the investigation then fails to bear fruit, it invites an inference that counsel was not forthcoming.
In fairness, a good portion of the media, including surprisingly some World Wide Leaders, seem to think this situation is vastly overblown.ivanvamp said:
This precedent is a killer, even allowing for the fact that we're talking about a playoff game. Integrity is important in all games.
This is why Wells & Co. tried to make an obstruction case, to get around the above.
They may be able to get over on Kraft. They won't be able to get over on Brady, who will appeal even a one quarter suspension and then go after them with everything he has. It bears emphasis that these player proceedings are evidentiary; we're not in rubber stamping mode in these.
That's Goodell's dilemma. Not making it easier are the network executives who pay billions for a product they do not want diminished or damaged.
Not just team but agruably it's greatest player. But the NFL has never been a player's league like the NBA. It's seen them as replacable commodities. They only care about maximizing the owners' financials.LuckyBen said:
Is a "game thread" going to be created for the Salem State speech or is it appropriate to post here?
Granted, I don't know how the investigators requested these records, but I work in a division of fraud investigations, and when we ask for cell phone records, we don't ask for all of them, but we ask for all of them within key timeframes. In this regard, it wouldn't surprise me if they asked for Brady's complete phone records surrounding the AFCCG, and a few other key dates. I really doubt they'd ask him or his lawyer to comb through for "specific texts/calls between yourself and Parties A/B/C between this date and that date" because that gives the party being investigated an opportunity to doctor the records, in which case it's garbage as far as evidence goes.Jettisoned said:
I think everything in the report has been dissected, interpreted, misinterpreted, and debated. Let's play an exciting round of: Gedankenexperiment!
Let's say Brady wants the balls at 12.5. He knows the rules, to a T, he likes the balls at the minimum, and he hammers -- absolutely hammers -- the ball guys all the time about making sure the balls are at the low end. Once in practice he threw a pick because the ball floated on him, and he (just to be a dick) checked the pressure and it was 13.6 and the ball boys realized they had missed this one, somehow, and Brady went nuts and threatened to have them all shipped to Green Bay in February. Brady has sat these guys down and let them know in very clear "I AM GOD AROUND HERE" terms that he needs his footballs as squishy as possible, and if they don't make his footballs as squishy as possible, goodbye cool job you can brag to your friends about.
Then let's say the ball guys begin to resent how hard he is on them. Welker and Edelman and Ridley take the same abuse, but they're making millions and they're pros. We're just part-time employees, for Chrissakes. Why is he such a dick to us all the time? Brady knows he's tough on them and gives them autographed stuff they can sell -- the least he can do, and also, hey, they do a decent job keeping my equipment the way I like it. But behind the scenes they bitch about him all the time. Because it's cool to be so close to Tom Brady that you can bitch to your friends about what an ass he is.
Then let's imagine that what they are doing, to get the balls the way Brady likes, isn't -- and I know this is shocking -- to get a very accurate hand gauge and do a precise adjustment. What they are doing is just sticking a needle in, after the ref checks, and letting it hiss out for a sec. They know the balls are at 13 or so when they come out of the box, so after the ref check (which they assume shows them to be 13ish), they just go "Psssssssss" for five seconds. So they did that, like they always do, and they didn't really consider that it might matter what the exact measurements are -- because literally no one had ever cared before. They know it's maybe a little dicey (as does Brady) to mess with the balls after the ref checks them -- they all know they are not supposed to do that -- but it's the only way to guarantee that the refs don't inflate them back up to like 13.5 (or 16, apparently, if they're playing the Jets). And also, come on, who cares, as long as it's in the range, more or less, right?
But then the needle went in too long, the AFCCG balls went down too low, they were exacerbated by the change in temperature, the Colts had tipped off the league, and now all this.
The question is: in this scenario, which is something close to how I think it went down, is Brady guilty of violating the $25K-fine rule?
I am sincerely asking -- I think one could argue that he may bear some responsibility, in this scenario, in some way. I think any decent lawyer could also easily get him out of even a fine. But I'm curious to hear other thoughts.
Let's say Brady wants the balls at 12.5. He knows the rules, to a T, he likes the balls at the minimum, and he hammers -- absolutely hammers -- the ball guys all the time about making sure the balls are at the low end. Once in practice he threw a pick because the ball floated on him, and he (just to be a dick) checked the pressure and it was 13.6 and the ball boys realized they had missed this one, somehow, and Brady went nuts and threatened to have them all shipped to Green Bay in February. Brady has sat these guys down and let them know in very clear "I AM GOD AROUND HERE" terms that he needs his footballs as squishy as possible, and if they don't make his footballs as squishy as possible, goodbye cool job you can brag to your friends about.
Then let's say the ball guys begin to resent how hard he is on them. Welker and Edelman and Ridley take the same abuse, but they're making millions and they're pros. We're just part-time employees, for Chrissakes. Why is he such a dick to us all the time? Brady knows he's tough on them and gives them autographed stuff they can sell -- the least he can do, and also, hey, they do a decent job keeping my equipment the way I like it. But behind the scenes they bitch about him all the time. Because it's cool to be so close to Tom Brady that you can bitch to your friends about what an ass he is.
Then let's imagine that what they are doing, to get the balls the way Brady likes, isn't -- and I know this is shocking -- to get a very accurate hand gauge and do a precise adjustment. What they are doing is just sticking a needle in, after the ref checks, and letting it hiss out for a sec. They know the balls are at 13 or so when they come out of the box, so after the ref check (which they assume shows them to be 13ish), they just go "Psssssssss" for five seconds. So they did that, like they always do, and they didn't really consider that it might matter what the exact measurements are -- because literally no one had ever cared before. They know it's maybe a little dicey (as does Brady) to mess with the balls after the ref checks them -- they all know they are not supposed to do that -- but it's the only way to guarantee that the refs don't inflate them back up to like 13.5 (or 16, apparently, if they're playing the Jets). And also, come on, who cares, as long as it's in the range, more or less, right?
But then the needle went in too long, the AFCCG balls went down too low, they were exacerbated by the change in temperature, the Colts had tipped off the league, and now all this.
The question is: in this scenario, which is something close to how I think it went down, is Brady guilty of violating the $25K-fine rule?
I am sincerely asking -- I think one could argue that he may bear some responsibility, in this scenario, in some way. I think any decent lawyer could also easily get him out of even a fine. But I'm curious to hear other thoughts.
It's unfathomable that an ad-hoc, spur of the moment decision to gauge the balls at halftime (only) of the AFC Championship game--something that's never been done in the history of the NFL asa far as anyone can tell (since no one ever gave a shit)--is a reasonable basis for destroying the reputation of the league's premier franchise & QB. There really is seething jealousy & hatred towards BB and Brady because that's about all that explains the witch hunt.
ivanvamp said:
You got it. The report became instantly uninteresting in section 1A of the body:
KenTremendous said:
I don't get the reference to Wilson shipping balls out at 13 psi. They don't take the game balls out of a box right before the game. They are extensively broken in be each team for their own QB and turned over to the refs on game day.
They did, but the way they did it was... how to say this... they are playing a game called stupid or liar, where it doesn't matter what the outcome is, because either way, they win.Jettisoned said:
Their models are needlessly complicated, but are complicated in ways that maximize the importance of over-simplified input assumptions, while forcing the results to err on the side of minimum pressure difference due to ambient conditions. This might be the result of an engineer or scientist with exactly the right expertise, who is deliberately trying to obfuscate and/or to arrive at particular conclusions, but my guess is that it is actually the handiwork of a fairly common approach used in sales engineering, which is to have a generically very smart person, but who only sorta knows what they are doing on this particular question, run a bunch of different models based on guesswork and vague knowledge of related things, and then cherry-pick the approaches that seem to produce the best combination of:
1. Arriving at the desired conclusion, and;
2. Giving the appearance of rigorous and objective analytics.
For example, if you wanted to measure, say, a particular part of your body, and wanted for the measurement to produce the biggest result possible... I bet you could think of a whole bunch of different ways to use the exact same length of string or measuring tape, and genuinely come up with different measurements. If you were really good at expert witnessing in litigation, you could probably even write up a very technical-sounding report, describing several different measurement methods, while only actually including the ones that gave results on the favorable spectrum of outcomes. Your inclusion of a spectrum of results by different methodologies enhances the impression that your report is a disinterested technical assessment of the facts, rather than a biased piece of fact-based spin.
I am reluctant to weigh in with my own analysis, partly because I am not really qualified to do so, and partly because bickering engineers with different results is not really the way you do this stuff. But just for the sake of illustration, here's a pretty good example of a much simpler, but arguably more rigorous modelling approach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gd0kGhIcF4
Edit: the approach in the video is not perfect, either, and I don't mean to endorse its conclusions. Getting really good, precise answers to very specific real-world questions can be a complex, expensive, and time-consuming process, even when the underlying science is well-established. But there are ways to answer these questions, and solving these problems is certainly within the scope of budget and time that the Wells report had. For whatever reason, instead of hiring a genuinely independent 3rd-party firm with expertise in thermodynamics-type engineering to decisively and competently answer the question, they hired a team of litigation consultants to bumble their way through a spectrum of scenarios that all point towards a particular conclusion, while hand-waving a lot of variables, and using mealy-mouthed metrics such as "wet" balls but not "saturated" and talking about keeping them "fairly dry", when the shortest path is simply to look at things like differences in wet-bulb vs dry-bulb temperature of the playing field vs the test rooms, and so on... they make things that should be straightforward complicated and vague, while relying on stipulated input assumptions for things that are or should actually be knowable.
It is possible that the testing actually did everything right, but that the people who wrote the report just didn't know the correct terminology, the right words to use. But that's why, in scientific circles, you describe the methodology, instead of just summarizing your results. Spraying a dry 50-degree football with 70-degree water will produce a different change in pressure than submerging a room-temperature football in 50-degree water, even though both might theoretically produce a wet 60-degree football in a 70-degree room.
The methodology, to the degree it's described in the report, is not how honest and competent engineers would attempt to answer this question. Which doesn't mean that the conclusions in the report are wrong, just that they are making a case, rather than proving the essential facts.
Brady also being carried live on Sportscenter at 7:30--seen getting out of helicopter at Salem at the top of the show.
Ed Hillel said:
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're asking. What I took from the report is that investigators wanted Brady's text/call data because the information they wanted wasn't available from any other source. They didn't have the other end of "the conversation" because they weren't even sure whom Brady might have spoken to about deflation, or whether such communications even existed.
Were you reading Wells' reference to "responsive materials" to mean responsive only to Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber's texts? If so, I think "responsive materials" refers more broadly to any and all materials responsive to the general request for information relevant to the investigation.
Edited: Missing word
CNN loves this story. Been on it non-stop for 24 hours. Also, how is Michael Silver still a thing?
NFL Network will go live to Brady if he addresses the Wells report.
NFL Network will go live to Brady if he addresses the Wells report.
Harry Hooper said:
Doesn't matter. What matters in Occam Tremendous' hypothetical is cause and effect. They know Brady likes the balls a certain way, they know the balls may come back from the refs a certain way, and they know if they do XYZ the balls go from being one way to the other way. If XYZ skirts the rules a tad, hey, welcome to the NFL. As a Pats fan, you can cop to the entirety of the hypothetical, agree to the rules violation guilt, and still have an incredible range of room to wonder why this was a parking ticket until it suddenly became an offense against humanity.
By the way, in the midst of all this deflate nonsense, everyone - Pats haters especially - need to remember that Brady torched the Colts in the second half of the AFCCG using properly inflated footballs. And he followed that up with an epic performance against the best defense in the NFL in the Super Bowl, on the way to winning the SB MVP.
And oh yeah, my Three Games to Glory DVD just arrived today.
And oh yeah, my Three Games to Glory DVD just arrived today.
I don't understand how the NFLN says they're going live, wasn't it said the opening remarks would be closed to the press?
What's the story with this press conference besides its at Salem State? Is Brady going to be speaking about the Wells Report or answering questions?
Jim Gray will be interviewing Brady, but they will also be taking questions from the audience. Gary Tanguay just mentioned that the audience questions will be screened.
PhilPlantier said:
The "to screen and control" is odd language. Maybe the associate just oddly drafted it and no one caught it, but as drafted it suggests to me that Wells said "we look over your shoulder at your document review.:
RedOctober3829 said:
Warning: if you watch this stream you will have to listen to Gary Tanguay.
Well, time to cancel NFL package on the satellite. If this is the way the NFL conducts its business, then fuck the NFL. It will hurt the satellite company, but it will also take money from the NFL. And yes, I know that my measly 300.00 isn't going to bankrupt either company, but fuck the NFL. They aren't getting my money even in an ancillary manner. I'm sick of this shit.
Fuck you Goodell.
Fuck you Goodell.
This is insane. My wife has her last graduate class tonight across the street. I rolled in with her and BOOM there's the Brady chopper. Anyone else here in Salem?
Okay, I can't find it right now, so I am probably misremembering the statement. Either way, I'm still on the side of "Brady shouldn't have shared any texts."PhilPlantier said:
Yeah, who knows what it means. It could mean Wells offered to let Brady's firm host any responsive documents on its server/platform and have no actual file transfer.Shelterdog said:
But we don't know what it means because the Wells Report has no appendix other than the Exponent report, and there is a notable lack of citations to evidence. I understand that Wells didn't have subpoena power, and there are no deposition transcripts etc, but there is certainly some degree of paper trail that I Wish were included and cited to where it exists.
Did anyone else notice that this press conference is in Salem, once known for its witch trials and The Scarlet Letter? Somehow we've come full circle!