Good to see Tom E not letting this go.
Reiss and Florio back him up. Complete posts below. Florio closes strong.
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Plain facts. NFL lied, stood on the lie. 105 days.
Not 11 of 12 balls 2 LBs under, Colts balls just fine.
Pats balls averaged .3 Pounds low.
3 of the 4 colts balls were low.
Pats were given wrong numbers, stood uncorrected until March 28.
They were ordered to remain silent on this.
Plain facts.
Goodell's response: "Cool kid Jimbo and I are going to smoke some opium, be right back"
The latter is not a direct quote.
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from the original Mortensen hit piece, this is all it says on PSI.
http://tinyurl.com/k6hmttj
The NFL has found that 11 of the New England Patriots' 12 game balls were inflated significantly below the NFL's requirements, league sources involved and familiar with the investigation of Sunday's AFC Championship Game told ESPN.
The investigation found the footballs were inflated 2 pounds per square inch below what's required by NFL regulations during the Pats'45-7 victory over the Indianapolis Colts, according to sources.
...All of the balls the Colts used met standards, according to the report.
Troy Vincent... told "Pro Football Talk with Mike Florio on NBC Sports Radio" earlier Tuesday that the NFL expected to wrap up its investigation in "two or three days."
Reiss
About those media leaks? Roger Goodell sidesteps issue
http://tinyurl.com/m9cb3d8
SAN FRANCISCO TO BOSTON -- Departing the NFL's spring meetings and heading for home, here's one final leftover thought: With the opportunity to accept some level of accountability for the drawn-out, not-good-for-the-league mess that Deflategate became, commissioner Roger Goodell punted.
This is part of what had Patriots officials seething for months.
Asked point-blank by Tom Curran of Comcast SportsNet about the Wells report failing to look inward at some of the league's missteps in the process, Goodell countered.
"I think Ted Wells did address that in his report. I asked him specifically when I engaged him to evaluate the league’s conduct to determine what we could have done differently," he said. "He was very clear in the report, so I would disagree on that point."
Wells might have been very clear, but he was hardly thorough.
Of the 243 pages of the Wells report, there was one paragraph -- one! -- that touched on this topic.
From Page 21, in the executive summary, Wells wrote: "At various points in the investigation, counsel for the Patriots questioned the integrity and objectivity of game officials, various NFL executives and certain NFL Security representatives present at the AFC Championship Game or otherwise involved in the investigative process. We found no evidence to substantiate the questions raised by counsel. Specifically, we identified no evidence of any bias or unfairness. We believe that the game officials, NFL executives, NFL Security representatives and other members of the NFL staff who participated in the testing of the footballs and the subsequent investigative process acted fairly, properly and responsibly."
How did Wells come to this conclusion? What about the damning media leaks that enraged owner Robert Kraft at the Super Bowl?
There were no details to support Wells' conclusion.
When Curran followed up with Goodell specifically about the media leak that 11 of the team's 12 footballs had measured at least 2 PSI below the allowed level -- and how the NFL never corrected that information despite knowing it was wrong and painted the Patriots as guilty in the public eye -- Goodell said: "As I say, we’ve given all that to Ted. Ted’s had the opportunity to evaluate that."
Wells' evaluation of that critical issue, which touches on the Patriots' claims of bias, never made it into the report.
In the end, all we got was one paragraph and a public punt from Goodell.
Florio
Goodell doesn’t answer question about media leaks
http://tinyurl.com/l89quvh
During Wednesday’s press conference that ended the quarterly ownership meeting in San Francisco, Tom Curran of CSN New England asked Commissioner Roger Goodell a pointed question regarding media leaks by the league during the #DeflateGate investigation.
In response, Goodell referred generally to the report generated by Ted Wells. When Curran followed with a specific question about the league’s leak of the false information that 11 of the 12 Patriots footballs were two pounds under the 12.5 PSI minimum, Goodell said that Ted Wells “had the opportunity to evaluate that.”
While Wells may have had the opportunity to evaluate whether the NFL deliberately leaked false PSI data, possibly to create an opening narrative of presumed tampering that would trigger a scorched-earth investigation of the Patriots, Wells didn’t address the topic at all in his report.
As noted by Mike Reiss of ESPN.com, Wells devoted only one paragraph to the notion that the investigation arose in whole or in part from an agenda against the Patriots. The 243-page document says nothing about whether Wells explored the leak of false information — a leak that likely led directly to the decision to bring in Wells for another multi-million-dollar probe.
Frankly, it’s a bit ironic that anyone from ESPN would demand transparency regarding the false information disseminated by the league, given that ESPN was the media company that accepted the false information as true and published it. In the 15 days since it became clear that the information given to Chris Mortensen was false, ESPN has said nothing about its role in fueling the early days of the #DeflateGate frenzy.
Either Mortensen was flat wrong or he was lied to. If it was the former, the NFL should have corrected the information quickly and aggressively. Instead, the true PSI numbers remained hidden from view until the Wells report was released.
On one hand, it’s important for a reporter to protect his sources. On the other hand, the rules should change when the reporter has been flat-out lied to. And if the NFL isn’t going to shed light on what actually happened back in January regarding the false PSI data, ESPN shouldn’t simply point out the NFL’s silence; ESPN should end its own.
