Mike Florio NAILS it!! Great analysis

RhodyPatriot said:

He ain't buyin' the dopey bathroom tale either. More convinced than ever Goodell will turn this over to someone else.

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/05/17/nfl-should-improve-its-in-house-system-of-justic/#comment-4259099

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Brady2Moss said:

Great job by him not giving in to the mob and actually thinking about the evidence thats been laid out.

What a sad, sad day where we now depend on Mike Florio to save our team's reputation in the court of public opinion. FML.

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reflexblue said:

I'm sure theres more money in defending the pats than goodell and wells.

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Zeus said:

Ted Wells was hired to prosecute Tom Brady and the Patriots for illegally deflating footballs. Attorneys are by their very nature advocates for their clients and the good ones can readily argue either side of any case. But judicial proceedings are adversarial in nature for a reason, with both sides aggressively promoting their own view of the case, at least in civilized countries. This is not the case, however, in Roger Goodell’s NFL, where there is no forum for Brady or the Patriots to advocate for their side of the story. Brady has been the victim of a one-sided prosecution with no opportunity to defend himself.

As an advocate, Wells can present the evidence that supports his case, select his own experts and put his own spin on his version of the facts. There are no checks and balances on this other that Wells’ professional responsibility as a practicing attorney as well as his integrity and (ahem) legal ethics. But even Mr. Wells would have to agree that using text messages between two parties (Jastremski and McNally) to infer the actions or intentions of a third party (Brady) does not constitute “evidence” (although his report says it does). And I suppose that Mr. Wells can decide whether or not to believe the context and explanations offered by the individuals directly involved; but these too are judgments, not facts, and most certainly not “evidence.”

There are many other legitimate question to be raised about the Wells report and its conclusions. That Wells’ judgments were promulgated and published unchallenged is a fatal flaw in the process. Both Goodell and Wells had to have recognized the impact that this would have on Brady and the Patriots, who have now been irretrievably judged guilty in the court of public opinion based on one side of the story. Goodell’s decision to hire Wells ostensibly as an investigator, but let him function as judge, jury and executioner, rivals the impressive and ever growing list of monumental ****-ups under his ham-handed watch over the affairs of the NFL.

Goodell tipped his hand when he said he had to protect the interests of the “31 other teams.” That’s wrong – his job is act fairly and protect the interests of all 32 NFL franchises. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Goodell has a raging hard-on for the New England Patriots and has for some time now.

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After spending much more time and effort studying this case in the last 11 days than I ever intended or desired, I believe the evidence is insufficient to prove that tampering happened on January 18, 2015. I believe that the evidence suggests something unusual was happening, but I believe that Wells and his team failed to uncover sufficient evidence to prove that it ever happened on any specific occasion.

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Here’s what the NFL leaked to Volin on Sunday night: “The investigators did not agree with [Dan Goldberg’s] characterizations in his e-mails and made clear after hearing out all of Dan’s arguments that they considered the Patriots in violation of the duty to cooperate. This is not like a normal piece of litigation, and if an investigator misses a piece of evidence he has an absolute obligation to follow up on the evidence. The subject of the investigation cannot hide behind technical procedural arguments, especially when the investigators disagree that there ever was an agreement.”

If that’s the case, and as Volin notes, Ted Wells needs to say so publicly. He already had a chance to do that last Thursday night in comments to Bart Hubbuch of the New York Post, but Wells didn’t. u]Instead, Wells contradicted his own report — and said nothing about the absence of an agreement that witnesses wouldn’t be questioned a second time based on evidence that Wells had in his files before the first investigation.[/u]

Apart from whether Wells agreed to have only one bite out of each apple (which is an extremely common reality in all forms of litigation), the fact that Wells and company flat-out missed two key text messages in which McNally uses the term “deflator” and “deflate” speaks to a lack of competence that the NFL should regard as troubling. Any first-year practicing lawyer knows that, before conducting a major interview in any case, it’s critical to know everything about the person being interviewed.

When documents are available to be reviewed before the interview, the task is simple: Review every single one of them. Twice. When a lawyer is being paid by the hour, there’s no incentive to skip steps — and there’s no incentive to rush through the process of putting eyes on each word appearing on every sheet of paper.

Even if Wells and company somehow missed the documents (which is embarrassing in and of itself), they easily could have done a text search for any words or partial words of interest (like “deflat-“) to pull up any overlooked documents. Regardless, the failure to spot those critical text messages before the first official interview with McNally would be regarded by many lawyers as malpractice.

So here’s the bigger question the NFL surely won’t be asking itself as it processes the failure of Ted Wells and his team to find two of the most critical text messages before their first interview of the most critical witness in the case: If Wells missed seeing such obvious and important documents, what else has he missed?[u/]

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1. Brady would have to figure out at some point in time that he preferred balls just under 12.5 PSI, in the 11.5-12.0 PSI range.
2. Brady determined that the difference between 11.5-12.0 PSI and 12.5 PSI was so great that he felt he needed to ask an employee to tamper with the footballs, and not even risk under inflating them and hoping they passed inspection.
3. However, Brady could only tamper with the footballs at home. He’d be using footballs that were so different in his mind that they were worth tampering with at home…but on the road, he would be out of luck. Despite this, he’s better on the road than most NFL QBs.
   • Note that this makes the Indianapolis Colts claim that the Patriots used deflated footballs in Indianapolis during the regular season essentially impossible.
4. During the October, 2014 game against the Jets, “the deflator” Jim McNally failed to deflate at least some footballs (that were 16 PSI)
5. Tom Brady, after blowing up on the sideline about the quality of the footballs during that game, performed the following as a charade to protect the cover-up:
   • Brady (allegedly) in front of others, declared he wanted balls at the low permissible range (~12.5 PSI) before giving them to the referee. (Even though McNally was already deflating balls…so why would they not already be at the low range to save McNally time in his deflation process?)
   • Brady brought a rule book to the officials to show them 12.5 PSI balls should not be touched…even though he knew McNally was going to alter them.
6. Furthermore, Brady would have to go through the charade of inspecting the balls pre-game in front of other people, knowing that these would not be the balls he would playing with. His true pre-game ritual was one of the following:
   • He secretly inspected footballs at some 11.5-12.0 range and then told the staff to inflate them to 12.5 so he could stage a second, phony inspection in front of others every game (right before the balls are delivered to the officials), while no one noticed him missing or sneaking away during this period, OR
   • He simply inspected them at 12.5 for tack and feel, knowing that once he let out a little air, the PSI would be where he wanted it. This explanation assumes that he is both so meticulous about PSI that we wanted less than a pound of PSI (which no human can seemingly detect) out of the ball and simultaneously does not think there would be a tactile difference between a 12.5 and 11.5 PSI ball that he needs to actually inspect the real ball-condition he will play with.
7. Jastremski and Brady are either horrible at tampering — setting balls to 12.75-12.85 instead of the lowest permissible 12.5 before the Jets game (which would make McNally’s work harder), or they did indeed start at 12.5 pre-October, 2014 and decided to make up a story to tell the investigators that they used to inflate to 12.75-12.85 so Brady could plausibly deny ever knowing about PSI before October, 2014.

I have yet to see Wells, or anyone, make sense of this convoluted, contradictory set of events that must have had to happen according to their meaning of the “deflator” text and allegations about regularly deflating footballs. Which of the following conclusions seems more likely to you?

Conclusion A: Tom Brady figured out that he really liked footballs just under the legal limit, decided not to have his equipment team slightly under inflate balls to hope they would pass a lackadaisical NFL inspection process (the technique Aaron Rodgers told Phil Simms about), but instead set up an elaborate process to take just a little air out of the balls, but only at home. And Walt Anderson forgot what gauged he used.

Conclusion B: Walt Anderson correctly remembered what gauge he used, footballs can have incredibly small perturbations outside what we’d expect based on just temperature and pressure and Jim McNally was indeed referring to “deflating” his waist.

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