Ok, I am going to lay this out for the obtuse Pats fans… your team is lying. That is obvious. This report that is trying to explain away the Wells report is full of so many stretches that it cant be taken as anything other than a desperate grasp at avoiding punishment… this isn’t some righteous defense of a good man, its literally the most obvious weasel attempt to not be punished…
First of all it claims Brady NEVER has directly said he wanted balls underinflated, but we know that multiple interviews can be produced where he infers he likes balls that are underinflated and other cases where he complains about the league’s criteria for the inflation of balls.
We also know of one case of a QB from another team accusing them of using practice balls instead of game balls before they could legally provide their own, and another where the league actually sent a warning to the team for doing so.
Tom Brady was the biggest proponent of the rule change, he obviously has a great amount of care about the subject….
That absolutely provides motive.
Secondly the focus is whether the temp that day could have caused the balls to deflate to the point they were… which is wrong… the focal point for the scientific debate is literally like .02 psi… but again, in the grand scheme of things that ultimately doesn’t matter…. Whether there is definitive proof that the balls were physically deflated or not is mostly irrelevant… that a Patriots employee illicitly removed the gameballs for an amount of time after they were taken and measured by the refs is the only thing that you need to focus on here.
Lets put this in perspective, Ryan Braun once challenged a positive drug test because the collector wasn’t able to send the sample by the normal fed-ex on the same day it was collected. The sample was completely sealed in multiple containers, had every seal and signature intact, was stored properly and never left the possession of the certified collector, but because the collector circumvented the typical procedures, the arbitrator ruled that they should suspect the worse scenario of tampering, even though there was no proof of it or reason to suspect it…. Its like that with steroid tests too, if you take a masking agent, the league suspends you because at that point you cant definitively tell whether cheating was happening or not…….
The minute those balls were intentionally taken to the restroom, the rules violation was done… at that point it becomes up to the violators to prove they didn’t cheat, not the league to prove that they did.
Thirdly,at that point the burden of proof lied on the team, and they opted to cooperate a little, until some evidence was found, then they quit. This isn’t a small thing… brady was offered a very simple task of letting his lawyers go through his phone and give the investigation only the texts between these men… they opted not to do that… their reasoning falls short of credible.
Lets point out here that Brady lied about knowing one of them and lied about contact with them… we know this.
Lets also point out that stories have changed multiple times.
Lets also say that the explanations of the texts are absolutely ludicrous and laughable…
I will say this once more… this isn’t criminal law…. The NFL doesnt need to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. They simply have to have a logical reason to believe this took place and they can act.
