Why I'm pessimistic

Dr Pain said:

Kraft, Belichick and Brady need there lawyers to send a ton of demand letters to ESPN for their actions and the wildly slanderous and libelous statements coming from their outlets

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Good luck with that. First, statements of opinion are not grounds for libel or slander. Second, as they are all public figures the standard is knowingly publishing false information or publishing information with a reckless disregard for whether or not it false and having it end up being false -- which is a very high bar.

My one and biggest concern is that they supposedly also measured the Colts balls and found them in the appropriate psi range. Now personally, I think the fix was in! But still, they will need to explain why this pressure loss happened to the Pats balls and not the Colts balls.
Again, this was a sting, so who can tell what the end results will be. Will the league blame itself if it was at fault? Or look for a scapegoat!

All these PSI statements are rumors from sources not facts and not announcements by the NFL front office so we can draw no conclusions from them. We do not actually know pressure of the Colts footballs or the patriots footballs and if the rumors are accurate the refs don't know the pressure either they didn't write it down

PatsWickedPissah said:

All these PSI statements are rumors from sources not facts and not announcements by the NFL front office so we can draw no conclusions from them. We do not actually know pressure of the Colts footballs or the patriots footballs and if the rumors are accurate the refs don't know the pressure either they didn't write it down

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Yep. We still have no idea which balls were measured or by whom, and it doesn't appear anything was documented which means that even if they were there is nothing the league an call evidentiary, especially if Kensil was the one who did it as he has no authority at all to alter them.

VectorPrime said:

By illegally measuring the PSI of the ball at halftime Kensil, by definition, let air out of it.

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True, but not significantly.

This was one of the obvious things that I checked when doing my testing, so that I could compensate for it if it were significant. It turns out that it isn't.

With good technique, it took about 10 pressure measurements to drop the pressure by 0.1 psi.
One BAD measurement (i.e., a dirty needle or inserting the needle at an angle) will allow air to bypass the seal, & can obviously produce a significant pressure drop.

BTW, one of my 4 balls sprung a leak, just moving it back & forth from the refrigerator, to a cold bath to a table for measurement. No 300 lb linemen jumping on it.

I don't think that the rate of leaking bladders is 25%.
Neither do I think that it is 0%.

Since when is a change from 12.5psi to 10.5-11.5psi a decrease of 25%?

tom.kordis said:

True, but not significantly.

This was one of the obvious things that I checked when doing my testing, so that I could compensate for it if it were significant. It turns out that it isn't.

With good technique, it took about 10 pressure measurements to drop the pressure by 0.1 psi.
One BAD measurement (i.e., a dirty needle or inserting the needle at an angle) will allow air to bypass the seal, & can obviously produce a significant pressure drop.

BTW, one of my 4 balls sprung a leak, just moving it back & forth from the refrigerator, to a cold bath to a table for measurement. No 300 lb linemen jumping on it.

I don't think that the rate of leaking bladders is 25%.
Neither do I think that it is 0%.

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Quack! Quack!

Patstopia said:

But still, they will need to explain why this pressure loss happened to the Pats balls and not the Colts balls.

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Here are two plausible explanations, with a combination of these two quite possible

1. The Colts' balls started out at the top of the permissible range while the Pats' balls started out at the bottom.
2. The Colts' balls spent the night (or at least the morning) in their bus outdoors and so were cold when filled and checked.

Patstopia said:

My one and biggest concern is that they supposedly also measured the Colts balls and found them in the appropriate psi range. Now personally, I think the fix was in! But still, they will need to explain why this pressure loss happened to the Pats balls and not the Colts balls.
Again, this was a sting, so who can tell what the end results will be. Will the league blame itself if it was at fault? Or look for a scapegoat!

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Total non issue for the Patriots. The Patriots do not have to explain anything about the Colts balls and science explained the Patriots balls. It is like we both get identical GMC Yukons that get 12 MPG with 18 gallons of gas, drive from Portland to Boston. Mine has 10 gallons left in the tank when we get to Boston. I don't have to answer for your Yukon's mileage.

It is scientifically impossible for the Colts balls to not deal with the same forces as the Patriots.

Patstopia said:

My one and biggest concern is that they supposedly also measured the Colts balls and found them in the appropriate psi range.

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Patstopia, don't worry about this.

The only 2 ways for this statement about the Colts' balls is correct would be:

1) the Colts were "heating" their balls on the sidelines during the first half (which is illegal), or

2) the Colts left their balls outside to equilibrate with the cold weather for a couple of hours before the game, set their ball's pressure in the cold weather, & then brought them indoors just prior to checking them 2 1/4 hours before the game. While this is not illegal, I think that it is highly unlikely.

Note that the "trick" in both cases is to keep the air inside the ball at the same temperature for the pre-game pressure check as it was during the game. The first method keeps the air warm during use, but is illegal. The second method keeps the air cold during inspection, which is legal but awkward to implement.

The fact that 2) above is legal is a fine statement of how confused & inadequate the NFL inflation procedures are.

The pressure drop of every ball that equilibrated to room temp (~75°F) prior to inspection, and then equilibrated to game temperature (~49°F) for that length of time was:
1.3 psi drop, if the balls stayed dry (i.e., were not used in the game), or
1.5 psi drop, if the balls got wet.

Both of these pressure drops were, have to be, identical for both the Pats' & Colts' balls.
And both put all balls "out of spec", no matter to what pressure they were inflated & checked prior to the game.

ETA: Ahhh, I see SlowGettingUp beat me to the punch.
See how much we're all learning about pressure & temperature?
See how we're learning to "beat the current system" & legally over-inflate or under-inflate the balls under the current inspection procedures??

Jackson 2 said:

That must be some SPECTACULAR blow you got there...

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Jackson 2 said:

Quack! Quack!

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Jackson, if you've got something, you know, "actually intelligible to say", be my guest ...

rlcarr said:

Good luck with that. First, statements of opinion are not grounds for libel or slander. Second, as they are all public figures the standard is knowingly publishing false information or publishing information with a reckless disregard for whether or not it false and having it end up being false -- which is a very high bar.

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1) While much of it was clearly opinion, many other statements were NOT opinion, but claims of fact.

2) Those (I'm looking at YOU, Marshall Faulk and the New York Post) still publicly claiming that the Patriots filmed the Rams pre-SB walk throughs should be relieved of several million dollars.

.

shmessy said:

2) Those (I'm looking at YOU, Marshall Faulk and the New York Post) still publicly claiming that the Patriots filmed the Rams pre-SB walk throughs should be relieved of several million dollars.

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Whether they "should be relieved of several million dollars" and whether a lawsuit is likely to recover more than the cost of litigation are very different questions: only the latter is relevant to the Pats decision whether to file.

The "cost of litigation" includes not only the attorney's fees, which would quickly reach in the millions, but also indirect costs: litigation would be highly distracting to the team as many employees and players would have to sit for depositions and there would be an endless stream of mostly hostile press coverage at each stage of the suit.

Each deposition would require each player or employee or deponent be prepped for deposition with Pats attorneys, and possibly have his own attorney too. For instance, the defendants would demand all the Pats game plans for the last ten years, all Pats financial information for the last decade (as this is relevant to damages), a detailed description of how the game plans were created and of how play calls during each game was made. They would depose Belichick and Brady and Kraft for days or more; the defendant would try and make sure these depositions were scheduled during the regular season or playoffs at times and places as inconvenient as possible, and would repeatedly criticize the Pats for lack of cooperation with discovery no matter what they said, and that's just a start.

I'm just scratching the surface here to give you an idea why the Pats are unlikely to sue a newspaper over exaggerated spygate allegations.

I'm pessimistic because of the numerous reports over the years (including this year) of how much the NFL front office and the front offices of other teams hate NE.

And Curran's latest piece doesn't do much to remove the pessimism:

Tom E. Curran said:

They’ve talked to enough people. At the owner’s meetings, I asked someone who would know what the holdup was. They said, “You figure they’d talk to the backup quarterback, right? Well, they’re talking to the backup quarterbacks from years ago too.” I don’t know if that was apocryphal or not, but I’ve heard the investigators have been through Foxboro more than once. Anybody who touched the footballs or knows the people who touched the footballs has been subjected to metal chair under a single naked lightbulb-type questioning.

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http://www.csnne.com/new-england-patriots/deflategate-questions-need-answering-wells

rlcarr said:

I'm pessimistic because of the numerous reports over the years (including this year) of how much the NFL front office and the front offices of other teams hate NE.

And Curran's latest piece doesn't do much to remove the pessimism:


http://www.csnne.com/new-england-patriots/deflategate-questions-need-answering-wells

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RLCarr, you are a great poster. Have truly enjoyed your takes on various Pats topics. However in this situation have to disagree. Curran comments on interviews stating they are speaking with back-up QB's over the past 10 years, as well as political consequences they will facewith Pash and the NFL front office . Sure, they are trying to find a Brady pattern, that also shows how absurd this has become. They didn't find anything within the AFC Championship, nor can they find anything within the Patriots organization that substantiates what the Indianapolis Colts are claiming. The Wells report will fall back to unsubstantiated allegations by Ryan Grigson, Jim Irsay and a number of NFL front office people that for various reasons want the NE Patriots to fail. Ted Wells is a good lawyer and he will find nothing to incriminate the Patriots. His investigation has gone to great lengths and an extended timeframe, yet he can not substantiate the cheating claimed by the Colts and whoever else has made these allegations............Kraft is right, there is "no smoking gun".

My take is very optimistic on the outcome for the New England Patriots!

tom.kordis said:

Ken Canin

Hi Ken, are you a lawyer yourself?
We all look at the world thru the filter of our own professions. My brother’s a cop, and everything is “cops vs. robbers vs. civilians (aka, sheep)”.
Other family members are medical, & look primarily at the medical aspects of everything.
I’m a mechanical engineer, and look first at the engineering aspects of things.

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I have a brother who is a small time criminal, between his interaction with cops along with other chances to observe their behavior, I've noticed that cops tend to (real or imagined) treat criminals with more respect than they do us actual law abiding sheep.

tom.kordis said:

Patstopia, don't worry about this.

The only 2 ways for this statement about the Colts' balls is correct would be:

1) the Colts were "heating" their balls on the sidelines during the first half (which is illegal), or

2) the Colts left their balls outside to equilibrate with the cold weather for a couple of hours before the game, set their ball's pressure in the cold weather, & then brought them indoors just prior to checking them 2 1/4 hours before the game. While this is not illegal, I think that it is highly unlikely.

Note that the "trick" in both cases is to keep the air inside the ball at the same temperature for the pre-game pressure check as it was during the game. The first method keeps the air warm during use, but is illegal. The second method keeps the air cold during inspection, which is legal but awkward to implement.

The fact that 2) above is legal is a fine statement of how confused & inadequate the NFL inflation procedures are.

The pressure drop of every ball that equilibrated to room temp (~75°F) prior to inspection, and then equilibrated to game temperature (~49°F) for that length of time was:
1.3 psi drop, if the balls stayed dry (i.e., were not used in the game), or
1.5 psi drop, if the balls got wet.

Both of these pressure drops were, have to be, identical for both the Pats' & Colts' balls.
And both put all balls "out of spec", no matter to what pressure they were inflated & checked prior to the game.

ETA: Ahhh, I see SlowGettingUp beat me to the punch.
See how much we're all learning about pressure & temperature?
See how we're learning to "beat the current system" & legally over-inflate or under-inflate the balls under the current inspection procedures??

Click to expand...

Why do you think #2 is unlikely when I actually believe, it is almost 100% the root cause. The colts with their equipment packed in an unheated jet landed in Providence the night before. The equipment, uniforms, balls etc stood in a box truck until 3:20 in the afternoon when they and the players arrived in In Foxboro. The Balls had to be delivered to the refs in 3/4 of an hour after arriving. After the equipment guys emptied the truck, taking the suppliers and uniforms to the visitors locker room, they brought the balls to the refs. That is less than an hour, now unless you believe that they took the balls into a super heated environment, during that 1/2 hour the balls were already at game temp.

Now if those balls inflation was adjusted by the refs to 13PSI which is nominal, adding a couple of PSI is not going to change the ball's temp appreciatively. Now since those balls are already at the ambient temp, they will not deflate due to temp variation, but they would still deflate slightly due to the we conditions, but they should not fall under the 12.5 min.

I don't understand why everyone assume that the colts balls started off at the same temp, when the patriot balls were in a locker room where millionaires are showering and getting dressed and the colts were in a unheated bus or box truck for 18 hours.

Ken Canin said:

There are a couple of ways attorneys can elicit expert opinion that supports their case:

(1) Just ask 50 experts. Maybe 49 disagree with you, but only report on the one that agrees.

(2) Many experts testify (or in this case, consult) as primary or secondary vocation. Sometimes, these experts will, as part of their job, infer the opinion the attorney wants and then provide that.

(3) Carefully manage the information that the expert is provided and on which he is giving his opinion.

In this case, strategy (3) is by far the most likely strategy the investigation will take. For example, an investigator might propose this question to an expert:

"Could temperature alone account for a 2 psi decrease?"

An expert would truthfully say "no" if he interprets "2" as "2.000". But of course the "2 psi" is coming from a number of imprecise layman estimates of various true psi values. (When someone says "a pressure of 11 psi", for instance, without more information one does not know whether it is exactly 11.000 psi that was measured, or whether rounding to the nearest integer was done, so that the reading reported was between 10.5 and 11.5 psi).

Even if the expert would believe a 1.6 psi (for example) decrease is due to temperature, if the questions is phrased properly, the expert can appear to support the outcome the attorney wants.

I think (3) is most likely what will happen, because that's similar to how the press was able to seem to elicit damaging opinions from that physics professor who was quoted as distrusting Belichick: he accepted unreliable hypothetical information provided by a reporter to give accurate but misleading interpretations.

Summary: experts, from Columbia or otherwise, aren't a panacea.

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No professor at an Ivy league school, will allow his findings to be presented in any other way than it was intended. His work is going to be peer reviewed, any questionable methods in obtaining results will be published and he will be ridiculed. My kid goes to Brown and has worked in the chem labs over the summers, Everything is checked again and again. The school will not be used to push an agenda. A non disclosure will not prevent Columbia from speaking out if the findings are not presented accurately.

For instance, if in one trial of the 50 they ran the balls the balls did not deflate as on the other 49, Wells can't present it as the ambient conditions were not an issue and present that trial.

And that professor Tyson you refer to has publicly apologized for the sloppy science and admits that he was wrong as he used absolute pressures and not gage pressure.

patman52 said:

No professor at an Ivy league school, will allow his findings to be presented in any other way than it was intended. His work is going to be peer reviewed, any questionable methods in obtaining results will be published and he will be ridiculed. My kid goes to Brown and has worked in the chem labs over the summers, Everything is checked again and again. The school will not be used to push an agenda. A non disclosure will not prevent Columbia from speaking out if the findings are not presented accurately.

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patman, oh would that your confidence in the press were justified.

Unfortunately, the press, NOT the professor, controls "what gets written" in the paper. And the press is INCREDIBLY BAD at getting their facts straight. And they are incredibly resistant to correcting their errors.

Feel free to skip this story ...

So, even if the professor is rigorous & specific about what he says, there is zero guarantee that what appears in a published article will be correct. Or that errors will get corrected.

Today's reporters VERY RARELY are interested in telling the truth.
They are interested in telling a sensational story.

"The Patriots are cheats, Tom Brady is a cheat" is sensational.
"Nobody did anything" is not sensational.

Until it can be proven that the NFL screwed the pooch.
Then "The NFL is incompetent" BECOMES sensational.

patman52 said:

And that professor Tyson you refer to has publicly apologized for the sloppy science and admits that he was wrong as he used absolute pressures and not gage pressure.

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Yeah, but Tyson's error points out something important.
Tyson has a PhD in physics & cosmology.
The average person is going to be shocked that a PhD in physics & cosmology is NOT an expert in something as simple as PV = nRT.

Tyson is NOT an expert in this field. It is NOT his field of study.
I am right about this.

Proof: a real expert in arithmetic does NOT first say "2 + 4 = 9", and then have to backtrack when others point out that 2+4 = 6.
A REAL expert in arithmetic gets the right answer, the first time.

A REAL expert in temperature & pressure in confined volumes gets the right answer, the first time.

This, alone, is 100% PROOF that Tyson is not an expert in the pressure & temperature relationship in footballs. There is nothing that he has done in the several weeks since making that first statement that has turned him into an expert.

Finally, once Tyson got this first error corrected, he then made a 2nd, equally egregious error: he assumed that the entire 2 psi drop was due to temperature, & concluded that the balls must have been inflated at 95°F in order to explain that drop.

He was wrong again.
His mistake was believing news reports that said exactly this.
He should know better than to believe the newspapers & TV.

The truth is that, in the famous "2 pounds (really "psi") low" comment, nobody ever explained "2 psi low ... compared to what?"
Tyson assumed that the entire 2 psi drop was due to temperature, and the balls must have been filled at 95°F.

In reality, it wasn't until several days later that Brady announced that he likes his footballs set to 12.5 psi.
The obvious interpretation of the original statement is "2 psi low ... compared to the league nominal of 13.0 psi", because they did not know where the Pats' balls were set.

So 0.5 psi is due to TB's preference.

Of the remaining 1.5 psi:

One has to be really demanding when identifying someone as "an expert".

Lots of people MIGHT get the right answer.
Clearly, a Harvard educated PhD in physics & cosmology can NOT be trusted to get the right answer.
Clearly, three separate PhDs in meteorology (whose professional world depends, in part, on PV = nRT) & 4 additional "talking head" meteorologists at The Weather Channel can NOT be trusted to get the right answer. (They also used gauge pressure & erroneously asserted that the pressure lapse rate was 0.02 psi/°F, instead of the correct value of 0.051 psi/°F.)
A Columbia physics professor MIGHT get the right answer. (He/she damn well ought to.!)
An undergrad physics or engineering student MIGHT get the right answer.

A true expert WILL get the right answer.

I'm demanding. I'll only listen to real experts.
I am not particularly impressed that the NFL chose a Columbia physics professor for this task. He will LIKELY get the right answer. That's not good enough for me.

In my opinion, the NFL should have chosen a contract engineering testing laboratory that regularly measures temperatures & pressures.

JMO.

tom.kordis said:

In my opinion, the NFL should have chosen a contract engineering testing laboratory that regularly measures temperatures & pressures.

JMO.

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PFPB got to Peter King and made him understand and he also contacted a professor at Columbia who made a mistake in a newspaper article and educated him. I don't see anyone getting this wrong when given time and their reputation being on the line. Screw this up as an academic actually assigned this work and you are a laughingstock for the rest of your life.