#DFG: Canceling the Noise

[splendid splinter]

Good Christ.

Must even the mildest criticism of any Patriot on any matter provoke a firestorm response?

They screwed up. Period.

 
What firestorm are you referring to?  I was just saying I didn't think Kessler wasn't even on board at that point.  But regardless, if Brady and Yee didn't pull in counsel from the NFLPA or at least have serious discussions with them, then they definitely screwed up there.  Maybe Yee thought his legal expertise was enough.  Maybe they underestimated the fervency with which the NFL was going to come after Brady.  Maybe both.  Still, there's been a lot of ink spilled on this subject so I could have missed something, but I don't recall reading that Yee was the one calling all the shots on this.

 

[crystalline]

PFT : Patriots suspended Jastremski, McNally at request of NFL
 
 
Schefter : 
 

 
This is the worst part of the whole story.
 
Goodell still gets to keep his millions.  So do Wells and the rest of the lawyers.  Brady has a top-notch legal team defending him.
 
And the two blue-collar doofuses who got caught in this are now out of a job and smeared in the press.
 
 
Kraft should re-hire these guys.  It's too bad they got screwed.

 

[joe dokes]

He was a union member entitled to union representation in any League investigation. And if he wasn't, he should have steered the dollars he paid to Yee to somebody who knew how to handle something like this

Yes, it is that simple. Yee should have so advised him.          
 

 
A good lawyer advises his client when he is not the right lawyer for a particular situation. Its one thing for a tax lawyer to deal with the car insurance company for his Aunt Edna. 
 
The unfortunate coincidence here is that both Yee and Goodell were in over their heads.

 

[crystalline]

Well, they didn't do "nothing" wrong. They were stealing equipment and talking shit. Which is funny because those two were so comfortable in the privacy of their text messages that they were so cavalier about talking about this, but despite ball pressure never being a thing before the AFC Championship, nothing between the two about illegally deflating anything. Weird. 

Stealing? Wasn't Brady giving the stuff to them and signing some of the items?

 

[Awesome Fossum]

 
This is the worst part of the whole story.
 
Goodell still gets to keep his millions.  So do Wells and the rest of the lawyers.  Brady has a top-notch legal team defending him.
 
And the two blue-collar doofuses who got caught in this are now out of a job and smeared in the press.
 
 
Kraft should re-hire these guys.  It's too bad they got screwed.

 
That story is from May, FYI. 

 

[MuppetAsteriskTalk]

Breer said on T&R last week that the Pats were annoyed that they suspended the guys with pay pending the investigation and the NFL characterized it very differently.

 
Suspended with pay?

 

[Harry Hooper]

Stealing? Wasn't Brady giving the stuff to them and signing some of the items?

 
There seems to be evidence that Jastremski may have improperly appropriated some memorabilia and defied his boss's orders about not giving swag (e.g., sneakers) to game day employees like McNally. I don't know if Jastremski's ticket sales were against any rules.
 
 
 
 
Kraft needs to find the woman at NFL HQ who handled the Ray Rice elevator video. Presumably she was moved to cushy job with a big NFL sponsor in a nice locale like Hawaii or New Zealand.

 

[drbretto]

Stealing? Wasn't Brady giving the stuff to them and signing some of the items?

 
I could be misremembering the details, but they were doing something they should have been with the equipment?

 

[bougrj1]

Brief intermission on discussion of the appeal transcript:
 
 
The "fill in guy" was Cris Carter.  Carter has been blinded with rage since the beginning of DFG and fundamentally has assumed guilt for Brady, Belichick, Kraft, and anyone else associated with the NEP, because SpyGate.
 
There is a fantastically amusing video of Carter losing his mind back in the Ballghazi thread.  He is representative of the irrational, gullible ex-jocks at the WWL.
 
Greenberg made an attempt to present snippets of the transcript that called the NFL into question early in the show, only to have Carter just slap him down (pardon the analogy).  Greenberg fawns over Carter, so he did not pursue any further debate.  I'm guessing Greenberg wet himself in fear when Blowhard Numero Uno stepped on it with Blowhard Numero Dos, hence the quick revert back to baseball.
 
Now... back to your regularly-scheduled program...

Chris Carter's son also plays for Indy now...

 

[OnWisc]

Even if TB turns over his texts and they turned out benign like his emails, they still would have used the series of phone calls between TB-JJ and JJ-JM in the immediate aftermath as evidence of a coverup.

Agreed. That this was ending up in court was predetermined back in January. Anything Brady, or anybody else, did or didn't do through this entire process only changes the framing. If Brady had handed over his phone we'd be still be sitting here today poring over the transcript that the judge ordered released because Goodell still would've stuck with 4 games and we'd still be in court.

 

[steveluck7]

 
Suspended with pay?

FTR, Chris Gasper on with Felger and Mazz last Friday also claimed that they were suspended with pay. He mentioned how it was one area of misinformation from the NFL as the league indicated that the suspension was without pay

 

[Drocca]

There would be another lawsuit in the works right now had they been suspended without pay.

 

[bankshot1]

PFT : Patriots suspended Jastremski, McNally at request of NFL
 
 
Schefter : 
 

At this point can these guys get reinstated as the NFL's investigation is over, just as a "FUCK YOU" to Roger?

 

[AB in DC]

 
 
No.
 
We know Wells was biased.  

 
Biased and independent are two different things.  We know that Wells had tons of biases going into this thing, that's not even debatable.  And those biases definitely worked against Brady.  But that has nothing to do with nefarious influence from Pash & co.

 

[AB in DC]

At this point can these guys get reinstated as the NFL's investigation is over, just as a "FUCK YOU" to Roger?

I'm sure the Pats found other jobs within the organization for both of them.  No point in broadcasting it all over the world at this point.

 

[dbn]

 
I just flipped a coin three times, and got heads every time. So, I guess according to the NFL that means every time I flip I coin I will get heads from now on. 

 
If we make an analogy where the NFL is flipping a coin: tails, we found actual evidence of wrongdoing; heads, we did not but will keep trying... (edit: for the impatient, skip ahead to about the 40s mark).
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjOqaD5tWB0

 

[Papelbon's Poutine]

There would be another lawsuit in the works right now had they been suspended without pay.

Jastremski, yes. But my understanding was McNally was a game day employee, not much different than a beer vendor. His suspension is pretty much meaningless at this date isn't it?

 

[Tim Salmon]

All of Exponent's conclusions are couched based on what Wells told them.  Their conclusions do not hold without the assumptions provided by Paul, Weiss.
 
So we know Wells was biased.  Because what he told Exponent influenced their results to "show" there must have been tampering.
 
 
Edit: In particular, Paul, Weiss gave Exponent the timing information -- how long the balls were inside before they were measured.  The conclusion of the report changes if that timing information was wrong. 
 
 
There is no question that Exponent and Wells (and now we know, Pash) were talking and they constructed this report to implicate the Patriots.  It is not believable for Wells to say that he was independent.

This is the part that bothers me the most. I'm not very good at math (or logic, I'm afraid), but doesn't compound probability come into play here? Exponent treats every assumption that Wells has made as an absolute certainty. But Wells himself relied on some pretty creative inferences. What if the probability that the Colts balls were not tampered with prior to official measurement was not 100%, but, say, 95%? And what if the probability that the refs switched gauges is only 90%? And what if the likelihood that Colts ball #3 was mistranscribed is 80%?

Suddenly, we're at 68% probability of all those events occurring simultaneously (not 100%), and that's before you consider variables such as timing, temperature, moisture, control group size, etc.

Am I way off-base here?

 

[garzooma]

 
Yeah, I think we need to stop saying that hardly any national folks are coming out against Goodell. That guy in the link wrote a front page story the other day on the suspension being upheld and he's now calling Goodell a liar.

Note that this is all in the Washington Post.  Last month, Goodell was in DC lobbying Congress to go easy on the NFL over concussions, saying that they can be trusted to handling the issue themselves.  I expect to be writing my congressman at some point telling him that it would be unconscionable to trust the health and well-being of human beings to these people.

 

[MuppetAsteriskTalk]

I'm sure the Pats found other jobs within the organization for both of them.  No point in broadcasting it all over the world at this point.

 
Considering 75% of the country still thinks they were both fired by the Pats (and without direction from the NFL), it would be nice to have this cleared up by somebody, especially if the source was on the record. 

 

[Captaincoop]

Destroying the phone was an awful move because litigation could have reasonably been anticipated.

But Goodell's decision very clearly misrepresents Brady's testimony and draws an adverse inference from that misrepresentation. Actually calling it a misrepresentation is being too kind. Goodell lied about Brady's testimony in his decision.

Aside from the generally inside baseball stuff about spoliation, the phone would have meant literally nothing in this sham process.

 
Myt1 - where can I find the Goodell quote you are referring to here?  I'm curious to compare it to Brady's testimony.

 

[BelichickFan]

This is the part that bothers me the most. I'm not very good at math (or logic, I'm afraid), but doesn't compound probability come into play here? Exponent treats every assumption that Wells has made as an absolute certainty. But Wells himself relied on some pretty creative inferences. What if the probability that the Colts balls were not tampered with prior to official measurement was not 100%, but, say, 95%? And what if the probability that the refs switched gauges is only 90%? And what if the likelihood that Colts ball #3 was mistranscribed is 80%?

Suddenly, we're at 68% probability of all those events occurring simultaneously (not 100%), and that's before you consider variables such as timing, temperature, moisture, control group size, etc.

Am I way off-base here?

 
Similar to what I said a while ago regarding Brady's "more probable than not".  It was also only "more probable than not" that anything happened at all.  So in reality a 50.1% standard to "more probable than not" doesn't work.  For Brady to have known "more probable than not" and for the underlying event to have been "more probable than not", you actually need a standard of more probable than not being around 70% likelihood or the multiplicity of the probabilities becomes less than 50% and less probable than not.

 

[Myt1]

 
I'm a lawyer as well, although certainly not practicing in this area.  I just think the idea that Brady saving that phone would have changed the outcome is silly, and some people seem to be there.  Railroading is the perfect description of what happened here, and if it weren't "he destroyed his phone" it would have been "he won't provide his phone". 
 
I read the transcript and I think Brady could have come off looking more cooperative, but I can't tell whether it is because he actually did anything wrong, or because he knows he did nothing wrong and is afraid of giving them more ammo for the witchhunt.
 
Basically, I don't know how anyone, including the NFL, can look at the evidence here and say with any certainty that Brady did anything substantively wrong relative to any existing NFL policy or rule.  That is regardless of whether you have a feeling that maybe he did.

I agree with you and really only meant the first part of my post as a direct response to you. Added your name in as an edit to try to track the conversation a little better and made it more complicated as a result.

 

[Myt1]

 
Myt1 - where can I find the Goodell quote you are referring to here?  I'm curious to compare it to Brady's testimony.

On my phone but images of the relevant transcript testimony and the part of Goodell's decision are posted as part of a NESN.com article.

 

[djhb20]

 
 
No.
 
We know Wells was biased.  The Exponent report says so.  
 
From the Exponent appendix, I've extracted full paragraphs.  Bolding is mine.
 
 
 
All of Exponent's conclusions are couched based on what Wells told them.  Their conclusions do not hold without the assumptions provided by Paul, Weiss.
 
So we know Wells was biased.  Because what he told Exponent influenced their results to "show" there must have been tampering.
 
 
Edit: In particular, Paul, Weiss gave Exponent the timing information -- how long the balls were inside before they were measured.  The conclusion of the report changes if that timing information was wrong. 
 
 
There is no question that Exponent and Wells (and now we know, Pash) were talking and they constructed this report to implicate the Patriots.  It is not believable for Wells to say that he was independent.

Not to defend Exponent too much, but where are they supposed to get their information from? It has to come from PW.

The fact that Exponent says that they got their information from Wells and the fact the the expert witnesses communicated with and got info from the lawyers is run of the mill stuff. It does not prove bias.

 

[Myt1]

Similar to what I said a while ago regarding Brady's "more probable than not".  It was also only "more probable than not" that anything happened at all.  So in reality a 50.1% standard to "more probable than not" doesn't work.  For Brady to have known "more probable than not" and for the underlying event to have been "more probable than not", you actually need a standard of more probable than not being around 70% likelihood or the multiplicity of the probabilities becomes less than 50% and less probable than not.

I did this as an expected value tree in the first thread. Two contingent 70% chances become 49%, which I thought was a wonderfully round way of thinking about it.

 

[MuellerMen]

I'd wondered when some media member would come at this whole mess from a "you are now warned" angle with regards to current NFL players, some of whom I'm sure find a certain amount of schadenfreude (if only out of envy or jealousy) in what Brady and the Pats are going through.  Well, I wonder no more.  http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/08/05/hurley-all-nfl-players-should-be-frightened-outraged-by-tom-brady-transcripts/
 
It might not change any player's opinion, but it might cause second thoughts.  The most persuasive bits, IMHO:
 

 
***
 
2. You Have To Relinquish Your Rights As A Private Citizen
 
***
 
Even though the NFL has zero right to read the text messages and emails you send from your private telephone, you have to give it up if the league (or a league-paid investigator) asks you to. You have to. You have no choice. Otherwise, you will automatically be deemed guilty, and it will impact your punishment.
Again, it doesn’t matter that there are many reasons a player should be unwilling to hand over his private communications to anybody. It doesn’t matter that the NFL league office has been leaking incredibly damaging — and occasionally false — information to the media whenever it feels like it. It doesn’t matter that, upon learning that a four-game suspension is suddenly the penalty for this behavior, you do decide to hand over those communications. It doesn’t matter that Richie Incognito “cooperated” with a Ted Wells-led investigation by turning over his cell phone, and he was rewarded by having thousands of his private text messages released to the public. Few had to do with the actual “bullying” investigation; most were salacious and served only to embarrass Incognito.
Yet Tom Brady, a man who is at least 14,000 times more famous in this country and even around the world than a journeyman offensive lineman, is supposed to trust that same Ted Wells to keep the private communications from reaching the public?
 
***
 
3. Precedent Does Not Matter
The NFL relied on its Competitive Integrity Policy in order to suspend Tom Brady. That’s despite the fact that the Competitive Integrity Policy is not distributed to players. It does not apply to players. Yet in this case, it applied to Tom Brady, who was suspended for a quarter of an NFL football season.
 
***
It doesn’t matter that nobody has ever been suspended for “general awareness” of anything, nor has anybody ever been suspended for “noncooperation.” Well, some Saints were suspended for it, but former commissioner Paul Tagliabue ruled that Roger Goodell had overreached in his punishment and therefore vacated the suspensions.
 
Doesn’t matter. Goodell will do what he wants to do, precedent and history be damned.
 
***

 
 
 
 
 

 

[tims4wins]

 
Myt1 - where can I find the Goodell quote you are referring to here?  I'm curious to compare it to Brady's testimony.

 
Full letter: https://nfllabor.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/07282015-final-decision-tom-brady-appeal.pdf
 
Will past the section in a sec

 

[DJnVa]

 
Myt1 - where can I find the Goodell quote you are referring to here?  I'm curious to compare it to Brady's testimony.

 
http://nesn.com/2015/08/roger-goodell-falsely-made-tom-brady-seem-dishonest-in-appeal-decision/
 

Goodell stated in his appeal decision last week: “In response to the question, ‘Why were you talking to Mr. (John) Jastremski in those two weeks?,’ Mr. Brady responsed, in sum: ‘I think most of the conversations centered around breaking in the balls.’ ”
 
Goodell also wrote: “The sharp contrast between the almost complete absence of communications through the AFC Championship Game and the extraordinary volume of communications during the three days following the AFC Championship Game undermines the suggestion that the communications addressed only preparation of footballs for the Super Bowl rather than the tampering allegations and their anticipated responses to inquiries about the tampering.”
 
Goodell is implying that Brady lied in the June 23 hearing about why he and Jastremski communicated so frequently after the AFC Championship Game. However, Brady readily admitted multiple times in his appeal to Goodell that he and Jastremski could have been discussing the Deflategate allegations against the Patriots and not only football preparation for the Super Bowl.

 
What Brady actually said:
 

Because he was obviously nervous the fact that these allegations were coming out that they would fall back on him. And I was just, I guess, expressing my concern for him.

 

But like I said, there was two things that were happening. One was the allegations which we were facing

 

[Nick Kaufman]

He's not full of shit, he's just been prepped (and properly so) to not offer more than necessary in his answers. One of the key reasons that you do this is that an answer that is otherwise perfectly reasonable can be placed in another context and be made to sound/feel sinister, which has happened repeatedly in this case. And one of the ways you combat this is to limit the information you offer in your testimony. So (for example) if you don't remember all of the details required to answer a question, "I don't remember" is a great answer.

The last thing I will add to this is that the Gronk quote you are using to make your case that Brady is full of shit is precisely the kind of bullshit quote Brady would want to avoid in his testimony, because it is 100% context-dependant. In this case, the context is that he is making a joke, which you seem not to understand.

The fact that Brady is unwilling to repeat that joke or that he is unwilling to concede that the joke is actually a serious reflection of his preference for ball inflation does not make him full of shit.

 
Come on with the making a joke. He's making a joke, but there's no reason to think that the premise -i.e. that he likes his balls deflated- is untrue. But even if it is, which in all likelihood it isn't, the fact that he thought what happens to ball deflation levels when they re spiked gives lie to the statement that he never thought about ball deflation levels in his career.
 
As for not giving the prosecutor nothing to grab on, I am sorry, as Florio said, he overdid it unnecessarily. The NFL might try claiming what they want to claim, but actually saying that we chose 12.5 because it was lowest limit under regulations is a pretty strong argument in my view.
 
All of this is to me so patently obvious, that I literally cannot engage in an argument with anyone about this because I think they re engaging in elaborate mental gymanstics driven by motivated reasoning. And you know, given that most of us, as Pats fans are liable to be biased, we should be wary of falling on that trap.
 
And this is a pretty minor issue. I mean Brady can be full of shit on that spot and still be innocent overall and the crime a case of moral hysteria and the NFL a bunch of incompetent buffoons.

 

[tims4wins]

 
Full letter: https://nfllabor.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/07282015-final-decision-tom-brady-appeal.pdf
 
Will past the section in a sec

 
Having trouble copying and pasting but go to page 8 of this. Rog is full of shit.

 

[Myt1]

 
Come on with the making a joke. He's making a joke, but there's no reason to think that the premise -i.e. that he likes his balls deflated- is untrue. But even if it is, which in all likelihood it isn't, the fact that he thought what happens to ball deflation levels when they re spiked gives lie to the statement that he never thought about ball deflation levels in his career.
 
As for not giving the prosecutor nothing to grab on, I am sorry, as Florio said, he overdid it unnecessarily. The NFL might try claiming what they want to claim, but actually saying that we chose 12.5 because it was lowest limit under regulations is a pretty strong argument in my view.

It would be wonderful to be able to present strong, self-serving arguments. It's just that they're not true sometimes.

 

[Captaincoop]

 
http://nesn.com/2015/08/roger-goodell-falsely-made-tom-brady-seem-dishonest-in-appeal-decision/
 
 
 
 
What Brady actually said:
 
 
 
 

 
Thank you.  Wow. 
 
The arbitrator blatantly lying about what the key witness said in sworn testimony, and then basing his decision in large part on that lie, seems like something the judge may frown upon.

 

[Shelterdog]

 
 
No.
 
We know Wells was biased.  The Exponent report says so.  
 
From the Exponent appendix, I've extracted full paragraphs.  Bolding is mine.
 
 
 
All of Exponent's conclusions are couched based on what Wells told them.  Their conclusions do not hold without the assumptions provided by Paul, Weiss.
 
So we know Wells was biased.  Because what he told Exponent influenced their results to "show" there must have been tampering.
 
 
Edit: In particular, Paul, Weiss gave Exponent the timing information -- how long the balls were inside before they were measured.  The conclusion of the report changes if that timing information was wrong. 
 
There is no question that Exponent and Wells (and now we know, Pash) were talking and they constructed this report to implicate the Patriots.  It is not believable for Wells to say that he was independent.

 
It's even worse.  It's pretty common in cases like this for the experts to go back and forth with the law firm (and generally not in writing) to establish what the assumptions should be before putting pen to paper.  As an example, the business about the pregame temperature being three and a half degrees  colder than the half time temperature (67-71 rather than 71-74) is the result of someone with an excel spreadsheet and tweaking the shit out of the assumptions to get the report to work. [And--shocker--those three or four degrees hurt the Pats because it changes the expected equilibrium pressure of the ball at 48 degrees from a ball starting at 12.5 psi to be roughly 11.42 (if the pregame temperature was 69 degrees, the middle of the temperature they assumed for halftime) rather than roughly 11.25 (if pregame was at 72.5, the middle of the temperature range for halftime) if I'm correctly extrapolating from page 39 of the report.  A couple of tenths of a psi here or there makes a big, big difference. 

 

[GregHarris]

Brady's emails are sure a fun read.  He wants to play 7 more years?!? 

 

[djbayko]

...
3. I'm a lot less convinced that the NFL Front Office pushed Wells to reach the conclusions he did.  Kessler basically failed in trying to make the case otherwise.  I mean, yeah, he got Pash to admit that he edited the report, which explains some of the more egregious language in the report IMHO, but Wells was adamant that the conclusions were his alone, and I believe him.
...

This comment seems to assume that if the NFL were to influence Wells at all, it would be during the investigation process, as the facts and conclusions begin to unfold. I think what most people are saying is that Wells knew going into this what conclusions the NFL expected him to arrive at, and this influenced him from the beginning.

Wells is going to be more inclined to make negative inferences when he has a goal in mind. It would not be inconsistent with his testimony.

 

[rodderick]

JFC.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13381860/jim-kelly-tom-brady-new-england-patriots-do-more-clear-name

 
Jesus fucking christ, if I have to hear another person giving the "how could a couple of ball boys deflate footballs without Tom Brady knowing it??" spiel, I'm going to have a heart attack. I see it everywhere, people keep approaching this as if it's factually proven that those footballs were tampered with.

 

[crystalline]

 
It's even worse.  It's pretty common in cases like this for the experts to go back and forth with the law firm (and generally not in writing) to establish what the assumptions should be before putting pen to paper.  As an example, the business about the pregame temperature being three and a half degrees  colder than the half time temperature (67-71 rather than 71-74) is the result of someone with an excel spreadsheet and tweaking the shit out of the assumptions to get the report to work. [And--shocker--those three or four degrees hurt the Pats because it changes the expected equilibrium pressure of the ball at 48 degrees from a ball starting at 12.5 psi to be roughly 11.42 (if the pregame temperature was 69 degrees, the middle of the temperature they assumed for halftime) rather than roughly 11.25 (if pregame was at 72.5, the middle of the temperature range for halftime) if I'm correctly extrapolating from page 39 of the report.  A couple of tenths of a psi here or there makes a big, big difference. 

Exactly.

An actual impartial scientist (I.e. not Exponent) would immediately sniff out that the assumptions were adjusted to fit the conclusions. It's blatantly obvious (although there is no actual proof so it is deniable.).

If this were a scientific document handed to Rod MacKinnon to review, he would immediately reject it, likely with a note saying "I suspect these analyses were manipulated by the authors, given their arbitrary choice of temperature range that lends credence to their conclusions". That's basically what he wrote on the Wells Report site, with more circumspect language.

 

[DJnVa]

Yeah, well, Jim Kelly and his 15 score on the Wonderlic never impressed me as a deep thinker.

 

[uncannymanny]

But there he is, as the story that ESPN chooses to run  :stupid:

 

[Hoya81]

Brady's emails are sure a fun read.  He wants to play 7 more years?!? 

7 might be a stretch, but barring major injury he might be able to stretch it out 3-4 more years.

 

[djbayko]

I'm only about 70 pages in or so but this is by far my favorite exchange at this juncture. (On phone so trouble quoting, but paraphrasing). Regarding the 2006 petition by QBs for permission to prepare balls, Goodell interrupts:


Goodell: Mr. Kessler, where did this come from?
Kessler: The petition?
G: Yes.
K: the quarterbacks and the league all signed it.
G: I know. I signed it. But who did it come from?
Brady: Peyton.
G: Peyton?
B: Manning.
K: and then it was presented and approved by the competition committee and that's what happened.

I'm not sure how to read that. Was he asking who beat the drum to start the petition or who literally furnished the document to Kessler? I'd imagine it's on record, so maybe it wasn't what I'm thinking, that Peyton was helping Tom out(in which case I might have to start hating him a little less), but a part of me this whole time has been hoping for some other big name guys to speak out and back TB.

Either way, I loved that Goodell was clearly trying to imply that Brady was behind the whole thing and got it shoved back in his face. You didn't know who drove that bus ten years ago?

Interesting. I remember in the early days of Deflategate, when I first saw reports metione this, it was led by Peyton Manning only. Then I remember subsequent reports stating that it was led by Manning and Brady. I wasn't sure what to make of this sudden change. Was this another pro-NFL leak to show how Brady wanted to gain access to the footballs? And was it possibly based on a misunderstanding by the league?

 

[tims4wins]

Exactly.

An actual impartial scientist (I.e. not Exponent) would immediately sniff out that the assumptions were adjusted to fit the conclusions. It's blatantly obvious (although there is no actual proof so it is deniable.).

If this were a scientific document handed to Rod MacKinnon to review, he would immediately reject it, likely with a note saying "I suspect these analyses were manipulated by the authors, given their arbitrary choice of temperature range that lends credence to their conclusions". That's basically what he wrote on the Wells Report site, with more circumspect language.

 
Kessler should have used the same line of questioning as the NFL did with Brady and the 12.5. They asked him like 8 different ways how he came up with 12.5. If Exponent (or Wells) had been grilled on how they came with the assumptions I wonder how they could have spinned it other than by answering "so that the Pats psi readings were below what the Ideal Gas Law would predict".

 

[In Vino Vinatieri]

 
Pats say they were so advised by the league. NFL says, "What are you talking about?" and denies. Whom do you believe more at this point?
 
It sounds like a re-run of the assurance made by Vincent to Peterson about a 2 game suspension being left in the dust by the NFL's subsequent actions.

Even if you do believe them, then the Pats fired these two guys (with pay?), but the NFL ruled that they must stay fired:
 

 
 
Patriots owner Robert Kraft advised Commissioner Roger Goodell last week that Patriots employees John Jastremski and James McNally have been indefinitely suspended without pay by the club, effective on May 6th. Neither of these individuals may be reinstated without the prior approval of NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent. If they are reinstated by the Patriots, Jastremski is prohibited from having any role in the preparation, supervision, or handling of footballs to be used in NFL games during the 2015 season. McNally is barred from serving as a locker room attendant for the game officials, or having any involvement with the preparation, supervision, or handling of footballs or any other equipment on game day.

From the NFL's statement of DFG penalties, sandwiched between paragraphs announcing the picks & fine team penalties and Brady's suspension. So the NFL may or may not have asked the Patriots to suspend them, but according to the NFL, the NFL definitely asked the Patriots not to unsuspend them.
 
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000492190/article/nfl-releases-statement-on-patriots-violations

 

[MillarTime]

Simmons powning Kravitz
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/08/05/its-bill-simmons-vs-bob-kravitz-in-a-deflategate-twitter-battle-for-the-ages/

 

[crystalline]

I love that Simmons is unmuzzled right now.

 

[m0ckduck]

JFC.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13381860/jim-kelly-tom-brady-new-england-patriots-do-more-clear-name

 
Wow, the gut feelings of one-time somebody Jim Kelly! I'm on the edge of my seat.
 
Refocus conversation on bogus subjective gut feelings, ballboys and destroyed cellphone: check. Next up at the World Wide Leader: Ravens again deny tipping off Colts about Deflategate:
 

Coach John Harbaugh was adamant Wednesday when he once again denied that the Baltimore Ravens tipped off the Indianapolis Colts about deflated game balls used by the New England Patriots.

About a half hour after the Ravens organization issued a statement saying it had no involvement with deflated footballs.

In his final comments on deflated footballs, Harbaugh pointed to his shirt that read "4 Fights Every Day

 
Treat deflated footballs as a matter of factual record: check. 

 

[Stu Nahan]

Simmons powning Kravitz
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/08/05/its-bill-simmons-vs-bob-kravitz-in-a-deflategate-twitter-battle-for-the-ages/

Kravitz comes across as being awfully thin skinned there. He did get damaging information leaked to him. Someone stating a fact shouldn't get him that upset.

 

[Jed Zeppelin]

 
http://nesn.com/2015/08/roger-goodell-falsely-made-tom-brady-seem-dishonest-in-appeal-decision/
What Brady actually said:

 
Goodell's premise is pretty goofy anyway since we knew they were talking about it because of the texts. Oh well, Rog probably just fell asleep mid-sentence so no malice there.
 
That seems like the biggest unforced error* since his appeal decision could be based on pretty much whatever he wanted, but he decided to base it on a lie. Letting Reisner cross-examine is the other given that there must be hundreds of lawyers available to them who had no connection to the issue at hand.
 
*From a layman's view. Other things like punishing under the wrong policy and so on may be more legally influential in the end. This can only help though.

 

[CaptainLaddie]

Kravitz is an asshole.