Ten years ago today, the Patriots blew out the Colts in the AFC Championship. The 45-7 final score quickly became a footnote.
Overnight, Colts reporter Bob Kravitz dropped a bombshell. The NFL was investigating whether the Patriots had deflated the footballs their offense used that day. And with that, #Deflategate was born.
We won’t relitgate the case here. My own conclusion, after following it as closely as anyone did from start to finish, was that: (1) yes, Tom Brady had a system in place for deflating footballs below 12.5 psi; (2) the evidence as harvested by a slipshod, results-driven probe that anyone deflated the footballs on that specific day was inconclusive, at best; and (3) Brady was far from cooperative with the overall effort to get to the truth.
Along the way, many learned for the first time about the Ideal Gas Law, coach Bill Belichick made an obscure (and delightful) My Cousin Vinny reference, Brady gave a thoroughly unconvincing press conference in the days after the psi hit the fan, Ted Wells published a 243-page report that found Brady guilty, a trial court blocked Brady’s four-game suspension, and Brady eventually lost on appeal. (The suspension was served more than a year later, to commence the 2016 season.)
The curiosity became a full-blown controversy when someone fed false information to multiple reporters that halftime measurements showed 11 of the 12 footballs to be more than two pounds below the minimum. And that lit the fuse for a scandal that sucked up plenty of the NFL’s oxygen, for months.
There were more details, and some news, in Playmakers. After the NFL implemented for 2015 a system of conducting spot checks of air pressure during halftime of games, the data was fiercely protected before ultimately being expunged. Which was interpreted as an indication that the raw numbers from 2015 games tended to prove that, even if Brady and his accessories (the “Deflator,” one was nicknamed) had a system in place for “taking the top off” the balls, the evidence on that day from that game wasn’t clear enough to prove a violation.
That’s why the final verdict relied on the phrase “more probable than not,” and ignored the “best recollection” of referee Walt Anderson regarding the crucial question of which of two pressure gauges had been used before kickoff to check the balls. Under a higher standard of proof, there’s no way it could have been credibly proven that cheating had happened. Even if folks within 345 Park Avenue became convinced that it had, possibly to placate owners who continued to believe that the Patriots got off too easy from the Spygate scandal of 2007.
Most have forgotten the details. (Hell, I had to resort to Google to refresh my own memory on much of it.) It’s a testament to a league that has its fans always looking ahead, not behind. To the next game, the next season, the next Super Bowl, the next draft, the next bright shiny object to attract attention away from the warts and the potholes.
The ironic P.S. to the entire story is that, a decade after the NFL publicly and aggressively labeled Brady as a cheater, the NFL has welcomed Brady into the club as a team owner, while also allowing him to have a competitive advantage no other team enjoys, in his role as a broadcaster who studies teams, attends games, and generally keeps his finger on the ever-changing pulse of the entire NFL.
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