By Flint Wheeler
Tom Brady is said to be seeking total exoneration, and it appears he’s entitled to it. The idea that Brady and the New England Patriots intentionally deflated footballs for a competitive advantage has been discredited by everyone from sidewalk chemists to Web physicists oh and someone named ‘Bellicheck’.
The NFL paid millions for a fundamentally flawed report by lawyer Ted Wells that made Brady and the Patriots out to be slam-dunk guilty, based on more than 100 pages of mathematical analysis of ball pressurization that turns out to be erroneous. The report totally rejects the finding that the footballs used by the Patriots in the AFC championship game had a significant drop in air pressure compared with those used by the Colts. But the truly damning sentence is this one, buried in its legal jargon: “The Wells report’s statistical analysis cannot be replicated by performing the analysis as described in the report.” Wait…What?
Translated into normal English: The math didn’t add up. It’s a standard principle in science: If you can’t replicate a set of results, then there is a problem with them. A flaw or a fraud is at work. Either you made a mistake, or you made it up.
When scientists looked more closely at how such a mistake could have been made, what they found was astonishing. The Wells report “relies on an unorthodox statistical procedure at odds with the methodology the report describes.” Translation: The Wells report said it would use one equation but then used a different (and weird) equation to arrive at its numbers.
Another plain English phrase possibly applies to all of this: Falsifying results.
Normally, these “special counsel” reports are airtight documents. The report by Major League Baseball on Pete Rose’s gambling was an unassailable document of 215 pages that included 313 witnesses and seven volumes of exhibits, including bank and phone records, and transcripts of interviews, that made it impossible for Rose to fight his banishment.
But lately the NFL has begun turning these special counsel investigations into manipulated campaigns calculated to enhance the commissioner’s profile and powers. And they seem to be written to fit predetermined conclusions.
Twice now, Goodell has ponied up false scandals that seriously and unfairly targeted individual players, and damaged franchises, on what turned out to be bogus or flawed evidence. Forget his bungled handling of Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice – at least those guys actually did something wrong. In the De-flategate and Bountygate affairs, Goodell hammered people who appear to have done nothing.
In Bountygate – Goodell went all hanging judge on the New Orleans Saints, suspending several officials and players for a supposed bonuses system to injure opponents between 2009 and 2011.
But then ‘they’ began to actually analyze the data and, what do you know, found that the Saints injured fewer opposing players than all but two teams in 2009 and all but one from 2009 to 2011. After this data report was presented at an NFL hearing, the suspensions were vacated.
Goodell is now in a truly interesting and awkward position. In one week he will hear Brady’s appeal. He has said, “I very much look forward to hearing from Mr. Brady and to considering any new information he may bring to my attention.”
Well, here is a boatload of very inconvenient new information.
Does Goodell stand by the conclusions of the Wells report, dig in and refuse to budge – thus establishing that he’s incapable of fairly considering evidence and is a serial abuser of his powers?
Does he try to parse and sidestep the analysis, by claiming that the scientific evidence is just a small part of the case against Brady? Trouble with that is, more than half of the Wells report’s 243 pages is taken up by pressure gauges and pounds-per-square-inch analysis – all of which must be thrown out according to “science”. If the balls weren’t deflated, then what’s left?
Or does Goodell do the right thing and rescind Brady’s suspension on the basis of the new info in the info and data (it’s cold in Foxboro and that can have an effect an air pressure, duh)– thus admitting that the league spent millions on a railroading farce? There is trouble for Goodell in this option too, because it suggests that the league office under Goodell’s leadership is either incapable of executing a proper investigation, or unwilling to.
Brady may or may not win his appeal. But there is one sure loser here, trapped in a box of his own making: the commissioner.
