#DFG: Canceling the Noise

Is there any level of suspension that you would advise Tom to accept?


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Ed Hillel

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If Ted Wells actually stretched Brady mistaking McNally's nickname as "Burt" instead of "Bird" to say "Tom Brady lied about not knowing McNally's name," Ted Wells should be flat out sued for defamation. That's a bald-faced lie.
 

Average Reds

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nighthob said:
As far as I understand the NFL's rules the Patriots have no appeal to the NFL's punishment. That's set in stone. What they can do is so damage the league office that Goodell's reign of error comes to a premature end. Right now the owners that have been trying to get rid of Goodell must be masturbating themselves into a frenzy, at this rate I would expect a coup d'etat sometime after a federal judge tosses the Brady suspension into the trash with a strongly worded, and incredibly embarrassing for the league, ruling.

I think it's safe to say that the next commissioner will be cleaning house. So I hope Kensil and Vincent have enjoyed their hour in the sun, because when it's over it's over.
 
I think that's true for individuals, but I saw it posted here that the team does have an appeal.  (Though I'm unsure if they have any chance of success with it.)  Kind of a moot point now, as they are going all-in with the strategy of "expose the Commissioner's Office as a pack of lying jackals and then get together with the owners to boot Goodell."
 
I mean, that has to be the end game here, right?  It can't just be PR.
 

Silverdude2167

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sodenj5 said:
Deflating as a term to lose weight? Sounds like something everyone says.
That is the only part Mike Freeman cares about. If that gets picked up they should have left that part out and just focused on the use only once in all his texts.
 

ivanvamp

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nighthob said:
As far as I understand the NFL's rules the Patriots have no appeal to the NFL's punishment. That's set in stone. 
 
This part just infuriates me.  So Goodell, being capricious and all, could have levied a penalty of a first round pick for each of the next five seasons, and there's NOTHING the Patriots could do about that?  No matter how insane the penalty is?
 

d-hose

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One of the funnier parts: 
 
There were some significant differences between the game play and handling of the footballs by the two teams in the first half. The Patriots had far more offensive plays than the Colts, so the Patriots footballs were used more. The Patriots had the football on offense for the last 4:54 of the first half (except for the last 9 seconds when Andrew Luck took a knee) — i.e., just before the footballs came in for halftime measurements, the Patriots footballs were being used while the Colts footballs were being held in trash bags.
 
http://wellsreportcontext.com
 

moondog80

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RedOctober3829 said:
There's a lot of good stuff in there, but explaining "Deflator" as McNally losing weight sounds ridiculous.
 
Yes, and the haters are only going to need one thing to latch onto.
 

DJnVa

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RedOctober3829 said:
There's a lot of good stuff in there, but explaining "Deflator" as McNally losing weight sounds ridiculous.
 
 
Maybe. There's no evidence that's what it means.
 
Of course, there's also no evidence that Brady told them to do anything.
 
 

RSFnFL

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Morgan's Magic Snowplow said:
 
They actually have pretty decent answers regarding the "deflator/espn" texts, which are probably the biggest "gotchas" in the whole investigation.
 
I don't expect much to change about the outcome but I'm glad to see the team at least offering a comprehensive takedown.
 
The biggest loser in all this might be Ted Wells.  We're going to see months of this report getting picked to pieces.
Can you summarize the answers?
 

Super Nomario

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nighthob said:
Except that if you read that section you find that they reverse engineered the starting the temperature of the balls based on the pressure of the Colts balls as they were measured. Which as was mentioned several thousand times in the monster thread leads us to the absurdity of someone cranking up the heat in the empty locker room. So, yes, the physicists that have torn the science to shreds retain considerably more credibility than the engineering firm that argued, with a straight face, that oil spills don't harm the environment.
That is interesting; I had missed that. The Colts' ball pressure is suspect - aside from only four examples, one of the examples makes no sense because the (apparent) Logo reading is lower than the Non-Logo. Exponent treated that in three ways: as-is, excluding it entirely, and swapping the columns (on the idea that someone screwed up writing it). If someone could have screwed up writing it in, it seems plausible to me that someone could have written down the wrong number - and moreover, 12.95 is kind of a ridiculously high figure for balls originally inflated to ~13, even late in halftime, even with the Logo gauge. Set that to 12.15 (consistent with normal differences between the gauges, and a plausible typo vs 9) and you probably get Indy's average pressure in a range where you don't have to assume 67. Per Exponent page 39, every five degrees gets you about 0.25 PSI, so we start creeping into the range where the transition curve does explain the results, probably with the exception of a couple balls.
 

Ed Hillel

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RedOctober3829 said:
There's a lot of good stuff in there, but explaining "Deflator" as McNally losing weight sounds ridiculous.
 
Yup, that's all that will come of this. Even if it's true, bad idea. PR department fail.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Don't remembe rhearing this:
 


The inspections and putting the footballs back into the bags was so informal that it appears that the officials may have put 13 footballs, not the 12 set forth in Rule 2, in the Patriots football bag.
 

dcmissle

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DrewDawg said:
 
 
Can you expand on this?
 
You think this release negates the chance to win on appeal?
I thought there was a decent chance that Goodell, or his designate, would reduce the sanctions marginally. Say the first to a second, the fourth to a fifth.

You can forget that now. I do not think the NEPs will be filing a lawsuit against the League, so the sanctions are what the sanctions are.
 

Average Reds

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Ed Hillel said:
If Ted Wells actually stretched Brady mistaking McNally's nickname as "Burt" instead of "Bird" to say "Tom Brady lied about not knowing Robert McNally's name," Ted Wells should be flat out sued for defamation. That's a bald-faced lie.
 
Not supporting Wells here, but I don't think that's the logical conclusion from that exchange.
 
My take is that Brady indicated that he did not know McNally's name.  Then he saw the texts where Brady referred to McNally by nickname and concluded that Brady was lying about not knowing him. 
 
It's not clearcut, but there really are no grounds for saying Wells lied about this. Not yet, anyway.
 

Silverdude2167

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RSFnFL said:
Can you summarize the answers?
https://twitter.com/MarkDanielsPJ/status/598880449251905536
 
 
 
"One can specifically see this use of the term in a Nov.30 text from Mr. McNally to Mr. Jastremski: “deflate and give somebody that jacket.”
They are claiming it is a term for losing weight.
 

OnWisc

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I'm not sure why anyone cares if it was a sting. A sting may be bad form by the NFL, but that has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. They either did it or not. If guilty, how they were caught is irrelevant.

It's not like the sting was the NFL having the refs tell McNally they were adding a little "extra" air, handing him a needle and leaving him alone with the balls.
Assuming absolute revelation of every possible relevant fact in such a way that we know exactly what the Patriots did and when, then I agree that- as far as any culpability on the part of the Patriots- whether it was a sting or not is irrelevant. That's an entirely different issue that deals with the league office possible acting in bad form.

However, where we stand now with far less than 100% dissemination of all relevant facts and many questions still unanswered, the question of whether it was a sting is extremely relevant, as it can provide some framework around how to interpret the information that has been released. If the NFL's goal was to catch the Patriots in the act of cheating, then it is presumably in their interests to divulge and emphasize those facts that support their contention, and to play down or disregard the ones that don't.

If it was, in fact, a failed sting, then it would be in the NFL's interests to avoid divulging any questionable actions on their part while attempting to leave the waters muddy enough to go with the "more probable than not" approach that allows them to still come down on Brady and the team. As a poster pointed out yesterday in an insightful post, this is precisely what the report appears to be doing.
 

sodenj5

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RedOctober3829 said:
There's a lot of good stuff in there, but explaining "Deflator" as McNally losing weight sounds ridiculous.
 
Even their wording is ridiculous. Wells didn't ask them, but IF HE HAD, he would know that McNally referred to himself as the deflator because he was trying to lose weight. Hilariously bad.
 

PeaceSignMoose

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RSFnFL said:
Can you summarize the answers?
 
See above, but essentially "Deflator" = Fat guy making a bad joke about trying to lose weight while "Not going to ESPN" is a reference to the potential scandal of JJ smuggling free stuff out of the locker room for McNally.
 

lexrageorge

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nighthob said:
As far as I understand the NFL's rules the Patriots have no appeal to the NFL's punishment. That's set in stone. What they can do is so damage the league office that Goodell's reign of error comes to a premature end. Right now the owners that have been trying to get rid of Goodell must be masturbating themselves into a frenzy, at this rate I would expect a coup d'etat sometime after a federal judge tosses the Brady suspension into the trash with a strongly worded, and incredibly embarrassing for the league, ruling.

I think it's safe to say that the next commissioner will be cleaning house. So I hope Kensil and Vincent have enjoyed their hour in the sun, because when it's over it's over.
That's technically incorrect.  The Patriots can appeal the punishment....to Roger Goodell.  Basically, all they can do is go to Goodell and ask him nicely, pretty please with sugar on top, to reduce or reconsider the punishment.  Chances of that strategy succeeding are debatable, but ultimately unknowable to anyone that posts here.  But a smart guess is to take the under.  Now that this new report is out, even the under would be optimistic. 
 
Chances of Kraft succeeding in court would be even smaller.  It would also be expensive, and likely not do a whole lot on the PR perspective.  
 
Brady has more avenues, as he has the NFLPA on his side.  Not sure if Goldberg or Kraft discussed this with Yee first; I would hope he would, as it could affect Brady's chances of winning the appeal hearing, which weren't zero.  
 
None of this would have happened if Goodell hadn't sanctioned Wells to publicly defend the report, IMO. 
 

Silverdude2167

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sodenj5 said:
 
Even their wording is ridiculous. Wells didn't ask them, but IF HE HAD, he would know that McNally referred to himself as the deflator because he was trying to lose weight. Hilariously bad.
But serisouly why did Wells not ask him about this text. If you are going to base most of your findings on this text you should probably ask the guy when interviewing him.
 

Rusty13

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Pretty much every Pats hater (and those "objective" journalists already preconceived to be on Team Wells) on twitter are resting their hat on the Pats explanation of the term "deflator" as a reference to McNally losing weight to try and totally discredit the entire response. 
 

rodderick

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They should have focused on the fact that attributing a nefarious meaning to the term "deflator" is post factum analysis, you're just looking for it to mean something bad because of everything that has happened in recent months. We have no way of knowing what it means, and the text "deflate and give somebody that jacket" sure as fuck doesn't seem to be conected with football preparation, which indicates it could have another context. Offering up the weight loss stuff as a possible explanation was dumb because it's so forced, unlike the rest of the retort which is very reasonable.
 

dcmissle

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I'll give them this -- football people, journos included, are going to eat this up in the same way the rest of America is addicted to reality tv.
 

Average Reds

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sodenj5 said:
 
Even their wording is ridiculous. Wells didn't ask them, but IF HE HAD, he would know that McNally referred to himself as the deflator because he was trying to lose weight. Hilariously bad.
 
I would think that the very definition of hilariously bad is drawing a conclusion about text without asking the person in question about it.
 

sodenj5

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Silverdude2167 said:
But serisouly why did Wells not ask him about this text. If you are going to base most of your findings on this text you should probably ask the guy when interviewing him.
 
My guess is he didn't envision them coming up with such a ludicrous defense, but he should have at least asked, "so you call yourself the deflator, what does that mean?"
 

Ed Hillel

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sodenj5 said:
 
Even their wording is ridiculous. Wells didn't ask them, but IF HE HAD, he would know that McNally referred to himself as the deflator because he was trying to lose weight. Hilariously bad.
 
Actually, that other text changes things. "Deflate, and give somebody that jacket" seems like an obvious reference to losing weight. I think we're all being guilty, including myself, of reading things and reacting to everything without waiting until we are done with the product.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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So, something else that is kind of glossed over in this rebuttal:
 
The NFC game had gone into overtime, meaning there was an extended wait in the locker rooms (AFC Championship game had to wait until the NFC game was over). McNally needing to take a piss on the way to the field makes more sense when you tack on 20 minutes to his routine.
 
I know it's minor, but the Wells report made quite a stink about McNally never leaving with the balls without the ref's. A 50 year old man having to take a piss because of the added 20 minute wait makes a little more sense.
 

BroodsSexton

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This is the game:
 
As noted above, Mr. Anderson’s “best recollection” is that he used the Logo gauge to check the footballs pre-game (pg. 52). The Logo gauge shows higher psi numbers than the non-Logo gauge. Crediting that Mr. Anderson used the Logo gauge to measure the Patriots footballs pre-game, the halftime psi of the Patriots footballs on that gauge are consistent with the Ideal Gas Law calculations of what would happen naturally. (pg. 113).
 
 
Without an unusual drop in PSI, there's no investigation, there's no "deflation," there's no letting air out in the bathroom, there's nothing.  Nothing at all.
 

RIFan

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ivanvamp said:
 
If it was a sting, the only way the sting works is if the Patriots are allowed to play a half with deflated footballs.  Now, if that happens, and if (which is the entire reason people would be up in arms) it provides a competitive advantage (as Francesa says, if it doesn't, then why would they do it?), then that means that the NFL, in its zeal to catch the Patriots, allowed the first half of the AFC Championship game to be played on a tilted playing field.  They allowed the Patriots a material advantage over the Colts when such an advantage could easily have been prevented.
 
And if THAT is true, then the NFL is running a corrupt operation.  Integrity of the game?  LOL.
 
 
RetractableRoof said:
Because a sting operation isn't playing nice in the "better interests of the league" sandbox/contract everyone signed? Because it shows intent to try to embarrass the franchise - potentially damaging it in the effort?
 
Not disagreeing with those aspects, but the idea of a sting has been used to show an unfairness to the Pats and that they aren't "really" guilty because it was a sting.  The point I'm trying to make is that if they were guilty of some nefarious plan to alter the football and caught in a sting they would still be viewed as cheaters no matter what.  The fact that the NFL is a garbage organization by letting a sting play out that way is not a mutually exclusive situation.
 
The sting has no bearing on guilt or innocence (and for the record I think the conclusions of the Wells report are wrong).  
 

Stitch01

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What do people make of the date of the Goldberg letter?  Did Kraft get word of what the NFL was going to come out with or did he have the Wells report already?
 

Revkeith

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sodenj5 said:
 
My guess is he didn't envision them coming up with such a ludicrous defense, but he should have at least asked, "so you call yourself the deflator, what does that mean?"
 
Not that I'm defending that portion of this report (I think it's a stretch to say the least), but calling someone the "deflator" as a term to lose weight wouldn't be in the top 100 of bizarre things people from Massachusetts say regularly.
 

Silverdude2167

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sodenj5 said:
 
My guess is he didn't envision them coming up with such a ludicrous defense, but he should have at least asked, "so you call yourself the deflator, what does that mean?"
[SIZE=10.5pt]Forget the response for a second which even if true they should have obviously left out as the media are idiots.[/SIZE]
 
[SIZE=10.5pt]If you are going to build your entire case around a single text where the person of interest call themself the deflator, should you not ask the guy what it means.[/SIZE]
 
[SIZE=10.5pt]Isn't that a dream situation for a lawyer, have your evidence proving guilt and then get a full confession? Not asking makes no sense and means they were afraid of what he would say.[/SIZE]
 

DJnVa

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Heh:
 
The League is, however, “generally aware” of the impact of heat and cold on the psi of footballs, having adopted a protocol which prevents footballs from being placed in front of field-level heaters. There was a violation of this protocol that arose during the Carolina game in Minnesota during the 2014 season, when NFL officials told ball boys for both teams not to continue to put footballs in front of heaters — an evident attempt to tamper with the footballs in violation of the rules.
 
 

dcmissle

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Revkeith said:
 
Not that I'm defending that portion of this report (I think it's a stretch to say the least), but calling someone the "deflator" as a term to lose weight wouldn't be in the top 100 of bizarre things people from Massachusetts say regularly.
99% if polled would not believe this; nor should they. It's preposterous. To that extent, the spinning is not helpful.

And by the way, this could take down in the public view the good points that are being made.
 

Smiling Joe Hesketh

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Deadspin already jumping on the Deflator nickname excuse.
 
That's going to bite the Pats in the ass. No one is going to read the rest of their rebuttal, they're going to look at that one bit and assume the rest of it is a farce. Big misstep here by the team.
 

bsj

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dcmissle said:
99% if polled would not believe this; nor should they. It's preposterous. To that extent, the spinning is not helpful.
 
In the context of the jacket comment it is not preposterous. It still seems more likely than not it refers to something other than weight loss, but it is not preposterous when taken in context with the jacket line (which no one will ever see)
 

Average Reds

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RIFan said:
 
 
 
Not disagreeing with those aspects, but the idea of a sting has been used to show an unfairness to the Pats and that they aren't "really" guilty because it was a sting.  The point I'm trying to make is that if they were guilty of some nefarious plan to alter the football and caught in a sting they would still be viewed as cheaters no matter what.  The fact that the NFL is a garbage organization by letting a sting play out that way is not a mutually exclusive situation.
 
The sting has no bearing on guilt or innocence (and for the record I think the conclusions of the Wells report are wrong).  
 
This is correct, but the existence of a sting gives the NFL a very strong incentive to come up with a finding that "something happened" because otherwise people will realize that they placed the integrity of the AFC Championship Game (to use their definition of what is at stake) at risk based on the privately communicated concerns of one participant over the other.