A report Sunday night from ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio included two eye-popping Deflategate revelations.
Citing information gathered for his forthcoming book, “Playmakers: How the NFL Really Works (And Doesn’t),” Florio reported that:
1. NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent was the source of the erroneous report by ESPN’s Chris Mortensen that escalated the deflated-footballs controversy.
2. The league later declined to release air pressure data gathered during the 2015 season that showed the same psi trend as the New England Patriots’ footballs in the 2014 AFC Championship Game.
Per Florio’s sources, Vincent told Mortensen that 11 of the Patriots’ 12 balls in that AFC title game were found to be underinflated by more than two pounds per square inch — a report that later was revealed to be untrue.
“It makes sense,” Florio wrote. “It needed to be someone sufficiently high on the organizational chart to make it credible, and to prompt Mortensen to use it, despite the fact that (unbeknownst to Mortensen) it wasn’t true. It’s unclear whether Vincent deliberately lied to Mortensen. Things were muddled and hazy and confusing in the early days of the scandal.”
Point No. 2 is even more damning for the NFL. Florio reported the league, under the direction of general counsel Jeff Pash, “expunged” subsequently collected psi data that showed “a director correlation between temperature and air pressure” and that “the measurements made at halftime of the Colts-Patriots game were not out of line with what they should have been.”
From Florio:
Beginning with the 2015 season, the NFL began conducting air-pressure spot-checks at halftime of games. The numbers were collected and protected, with none of the information ever coming to light.
It was expected that, given the operation of the Ideal Gas Law, the pressure inside the balls would rise on warm days, and that it would fall on cold days. That’s exactly what happened. As the source put it, “numerous” measurements made at halftime of games during the 2015 season generated numbers beyond the permitted range of 12.5 to 13.5 psi, with the reading showing a direct correlation between temperature and air pressure.
On cold days, pressure readings taken before the balls were moved to the field resulted in lower readings after 90 minutes of exposure to the conditions. On hot days, the pressure increased.
Indeed, it was believed that the actual numbers measured in the footballs used by the Patriots were generally consistent with the numbers that the atmospheric conditions should have generated that day. This should have resulted in a finding that, at most, the evidence was inconclusive as to whether there had been deliberate deflation on the day in question. …
So what happened to those numbers from the 2015 season? Per a source with knowledge of the situation, and as reported in Playmakers, the NFL expunged the numbers. It happened at the direct order, per the source, of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash.
Why would the league delete the numbers? It’s simple. For cold days, the numbers were too close to the actual numbers generated by the New England footballs at halftime of the playoff game against the Colts. Which means that the numbers generated at halftime of the January 2015 AFC Championship were not evidence of cheating, but of the normal operation of air pressure inside a rubber bladder when the temperature drops. Just as it was expected.
Deflategate spawned an 18-month legal ordeal that ended with quarterback Tom Brady being suspended for four games and the Patriots losing $1 million and first- and fourth-round draft picks.
