One year ago this week, an Indianapolis Colt named D'Qwell Jackson intercepted a Tom Brady pass in the AFC championship game.
The ball soon found its way into the hands of Brian Seabrooks, the Colts' assistant equipment manager, who was suspicious of its inflation level. He quickly had an intern measure it from the sideline (and in the approximately 48-degree temperature of Foxborough, Mass.). When it came in under the NFL minimum 12.5 pounds per square inch, everyone from Colts executives to officials and even an NFL vice president believed it was proof of blatant cheating.
The entire case worked backward from there, even if science says the psi level was probably exactly where it should naturally be and thus nothing unnatural, let alone nefarious, was occurring.
Science, of course, meant nothing in this case. At least not at the time.....
One year later, Brady and the Patriots return to the AFC championship game on Sunday in Denver. Since that fateful moment an intern tested the football, Brady has gone 15-4 on the field and 1-0 in federal court. He has captured a Super Bowl and thrown 44 touchdowns against nine interceptions (with the NFL watching the footballs).
And despite the NFL stripping New England of a first-round pick, fining it $1 million and millions of fans still believing the story, you actually have to wonder if deflate-gate is finally dead … at least to anyone still paying attention. Namely, there appears to be a scientific consensus, if not unanimous opinion, that those footballs were never illegally deflated.....
As time has allowed more serious analysis to come in, the results have been an overwhelming destruction of the conclusions of Wells, Exponent and the consulting work of Princeton professor Daniel Marlow.
It's been from all directions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (multiple studies), Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Chicago, Boston College, the University of Nebraska, the University of Illinois, the University of New Hampshire, Bowdoin College, Rockefeller University, where a Nobel Prize winner couldn't have lampooned it more viciously, and so on and so on.
Then there were unaffiliated retired scientists, climate experts, professional labs, even the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, which crushed the science of Wells' report. A fourth-grader in Sacramento discredited it for her school science fair......
Maybe there is a professor or study out there that, with the currently available information, defends Exponent, Wells and the NFL, but there aren't any readily found on the Internet or in scientific journals. They certainly aren't making themselves easy to find.
If every smart scientist who studied this case (and isn't affiliated with the league) says nothing happened, then how long does everyone keep saying something did?
The most damning rebuke is from Dr. John Leonard, one of numerous professors at MIT who have tackled this case. In a popular YouTube video, the Philadelphia Eagles fan doesn't just blast Exponent's conclusions but shows the flawed methodology that failed to account for how atmospheric pressure impacted the footballs that were measured at halftime. He basically calls them hacks, and when he fixes their mistake, he essentially closes the argument out. In the months-old video he asks Exponent to explain itself. To date, it hasn't. Apparently no one has disagreed with Leonard's findings.
"The Colts' balls were as much out of range as the Patriots' balls," Leonard told a class on the deflate-gate at UNH, according to the Boston Globe. "It's pretty much an open-and-shut case, but somehow [commissioner Roger] Goodell never understood it, and still doesn't to this day."....
