No idea what the right thread is for this...mods feel free to move as appropriate. But in light of the MLB cheating scandal, ESPN published this article looking back on Deflategate:
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/28502507/what-really-happened-deflategate-five-years-later-nfl-scandal-aged-poorly
Some snippets:
"Hey, baseball world: We here on the NFL side are sorry to see your game engulfed in a
cheating scandal. It's truly awful to know that the
Houston Astros swindled their way to the 2017 World Series title. But I've got to laugh and remind you that five years ago today, the NFL produced a scandal that was chess to your checkers.
Deflategate was a Jedi mind trick to your multiplication tables. It was HD digital to your analog. In its zeal to preserve the perception of credible outcomes, the NFL scandalized itself with an investigation that produced far more suspicion, ill will and accusations of impropriety than the original allegations themselves."
"At best, it was a relatively minor rules violation that no rational person would link to the Patriots' victory two weeks later in Super Bowl XLIX. At worst, Deflategate was a retroactive framing of the league's most successful franchise and a future Hall of Fame quarterback, a clumsy and forgettable endeavor and an unfortunate reminder that the NFL's standard for discipline demands only that an event was "more probable than not" to have occurred. Brady ultimately served a four-game suspension because the NFL believed he was "generally aware" of the scheme."
"The Patriots? They paid dearly for a far less consequential allegation, in part because the NFL considered them repeat cheaters after the 2007 Spygate affair.
In this case, however, the Patriots denied nearly every aspect of the NFL's allegations, including Brady's involvement, and took extraordinary steps to defend themselves. That effort included a
website to dispute the NFL's Wells Report on the scandal, one that included multiple scientists pointing out that footballs can deflate naturally based on weather conditions.
The Patriots even submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Brady, who filed a federal lawsuit against the league to overturn his suspension, straddling the line between NFL stakeholder and whistleblower. (Brady got his suspension overturned in 2015 but ultimately lost on appeal and served the punishment in 2016.)
Yet when it was all over, no one could say for sure
if Deflategate actually happened. A reasonable person could be left thinking that the investigation itself was the true scandal."
"The Wells Report was based largely on a series of text messages from an equipment assistant who referred to himself as "The Deflator," and the unexplained pregame detour of a locker room attendant who brought the game balls into a bathroom with him before the game. There was no direct evidence that the equipment assistant removed air from the footballs, or that Brady asked him to do it. And the halftime inflation measurement was a rushed and haphazard effort, one that would never pass scientific scrutiny to confirm accuracy."
"In the end, it is nothing more than an opinion to suggest that it was "more probable than not" that Deflategate happened. In the terms of advanced statistics, the NFL was saying there was a 51% probability that Deflategate occurred but a 100% necessity to issue discipline. It's not outlandish to think that someone connected with the Patriots might have tried to help Brady, or that Brady had tacitly accepted that help, but there's no direct evidence of it.
And when an MIT professor explained that
weather conditions could do the same thing, based on the ideal gas law, who could argue? The NFL wouldn't have known either way, because it did not regularly record pounds-per-square-inch readings to that point. For all we know, football deflation occurred naturally every week."
It goes on and talks about how DFG - despite having no real evidence at all that it happened - has been part of the reason the Pats were viewed with suspicion for the Bengals sideline taping.
Super interesting read, IMO. I wish they'd have gone into more detail (it was briefly mentioned) about how the NFL supposedly took great pains to test footballs the following season, but never released any of the data. I wonder why? Hmmmmmm... Maybe because the laws of physics worked in 2015 and 2016, just like they did in 2014, and a cold game in Green Bay in 2015 would show......a loss of air pressure?
Anyway, kind of surprising to see this ESPN article kind of exonerate the Patriots at least a little.