New Report Reveals Explosive Details On NFL’s Deflategate Handling

Deflategate was quite a scandal a few years ago. There were so many theories about the scandal and we seem to be getting a glance at another aspect of the whole situation. Mike Florio has details of the Deflategate handling. What does that mean? Patriots fans will start off a big debate.

Florio has been gathering information for his book, “Playmakers: How the NFL Really Works (And Doesn’t)”. He included two major details:

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.

Vincent informed Mortensen that 11 of the balls in the AFC title game were lighter by more than two pounds per square inch. Of course, this report wasn’t true.

“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.”

Deflategate rocked the NFL and people still talk about it. Tom Brady was hit with a four-game suspension. Problems didn’t end here. The Patriots lost $1 million and a first- and fourth-round draft pick.

Mike Florio offered huge details of the Deflategate handling

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. …

There’s more…

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.

Let’s see how will the NFL react to this. Florio knows how to attract everyone’s attention. His new book will definitely add fuel to the fire.