The Controversy Of Deflategate

Ever since I was a little boy I have been fascinated with the National Football League. Although many people believe that the New England Patriots deliberately deflated NFL game footballs, undistorted, scientific analysis of the evidence shows otherwise.

The NFL launched an investigation of Deflategate shortly after the allegations were made regarding the footballs used by the Patriots in the AFC Championship game. On January 23, 2015 the NFL stated that the investigation would be performed by the NFL executive vice president Jeff Pash, and Ted Wells, an attorney from the Paul Weiss law firm. Finally, on May 6, after four months of waiting the NFL published a 243-page investigative report regarding the deflation of footballs used in the AFC

When dealing with a situation such as Deflategate there are many uncertainties for which you must make assumptions. Many things in the investigation were assumed, most of which were accurate, but some important assumptions that were made were quite inaccurate. So, the next reason why the NFL investigation was flawed, is exactly that; inaccurate assumptions were made. The main inaccurate assumption was regarding the timeline on which the events during halftime occurred, more specifically they assumed that each team's footballs were pressure gauged right after one another during halftime. To put this in context, during halftime of the AFC championship, six officials took both team's game balls and went into the Officials Locker Room to gauge the footballs. Officials Clete Blakeman and Dyrol Prioleau gauged the footballs while three of the other officials supervised and one recorded the data (Wells 66,67). The Wells report assumes that its took 2-4 minutes to begin the ball testing protocol, 4-5 minutes to complete the gauging of the Patriots balls, and 2-5 minutes to re-inflate the Patriots footballs to the proper psi (Wells 70). Under these timing assumptions the officials would not have finished their initial gauging of the 11 Patriots footballs until up to nine minutes into halftime. Because halftime was 13.5 minutes long, that would have left them 4.5 minutes to re-inflate and re-gauge the 11 Patriots footballs and gauge the 4 Colts footballs. If the Wells Report timing assumptions were accurate, it would mean that the officials could not have completed all of these actions during the 13.5 minutes of halftime. This false assumption in the Wells Report ultimately leads to other false assumptions in the analysis. The first assumption being that the Patriots balls had 2-4 minutes to warm up before they were gauged, thus the psi before they