First, the report ignores the information the investigators gathered that Mr. Jastremski’s duties in football preparation in fact routinely involve deflating every football at least twice. Every team in the League has developed a standard operating procedure for the preparation of new footballs for game play. The Patriots standard procedures are described in part on pgs. 37-40. Omitted from that description, but as Mr. Jastremski explained, is that the very first thing he routinely does when he opens a new box of Wilson footballs is to take a bit of air out of them. That makes them easier to prepare. The second time he takes air out of footballs is when he sets them for Mr. Brady’s pre-game review and selection. (pgs. 39-40). Prior to the Jets game in 2014, Mr. Jastremski set the footballs at 12.75-12.85 for Mr. Brady’s pre-game inspection and selection, since that is the range that had been used by Mr. Jastremski’s predecessor. Curiously, the report does not credit this statement, although no witness or other evidence contradicted it, and apparently no game official reported that, in any games prior to the Jets 2014 game, footballs from the Patriots did not routinely arrive at the Officials’ Locker Room precisely as Mr. Jastremski described. Nonetheless, the report states disbelief to the statement because it does not support the report’s assumption that Mr. Brady cared about psi levels long before the Jets game over-inflation fiasco. The report discredits this information – about which there was no reason to lie and which could have been checked in all events — solely because of (i) Mr. McNally’s May 2014 text reference to himself as the “deflator” (which had nothing to do with what psi the footballs were set at for Mr. Brady’s inspection); (ii) Mr. Brady’s involvement in the 2006 Rule change (which, as explained elsewhere, dealt with tactile feel and football consistency, not psi levels); and (iii) Mr. Brady’s “apparent longstanding preference for footballs inflated to the low end of the permissible range” (although setting footballs at 12.75-85 is not much different from setting them at 12.6, which is what Mr. Jastremski did following the very first time Mr. Brady focused on actual psi numbers). In short, not “crediting” the evidence that footballs were historically set at 12.75-85 demonstrates mostly how the report lets its interpretation of the texts then control how it views all other evidence. In all events, there is no question that Mr. Jastremski had to deflate footballs a second time just before Mr. Brady’s selection. To get them to the desired (and permissible) level, one adds air and then releases the air to the desired psi. After mid-season in 2014 — i.e., after the Jets game issues with vastly over-inflated footballs — he set them at 12.6 for Mr. Brady’s inspection and selection — again adding air and releasing it to get down to the desired psi. So deflation of footballs cannot be presumed to refer to post-referee inspection conduct. Indeed, Mr. Jastremski does not even have possession of the footballs once they go to the Officials’ Locker Room for pre-game inspection.
