That's some crackpot bolding and capitalizing! As much as part of me is ready to dive into every rabbit hole that opens up, I think what we see here is as follows:
- In the JEST game, a ref just casually says/thinks "them damn Patriots and their saggy (i.e., 12.5 PSI) balls! Jack these way up!"
- Up they are jacked, no measurement taken, because it's bullcrap that this measuring process is some kind of sacrosanct ritual.
- THEN they turn it into the Holy PSI Measurement Ritual as part of the "gate" thing. Sounds like bullcrap to me. I think when Brady's pissed that the ball's jacked way the hell up, the ref reprises Aiello's role from 2006: "That's football"
Of course, "That's football" most days, unless it's your World Champion New England Patriots.
The worst thing about the Wells report is that it is not written to answer the question "what happened." It is written to answer the question "Are the Patriots guilty?" That's the first layer of bias; of course, the second through 3487th layer is all the tricks that go into "Generally aware" of "more probable than not."
But back to the first question: What happened here?
If you take a systems approach, if you're trotting out those texts discussing the rogue refs' behavior, you run that down, and you put it in black and white. Even if you don't like the guy who says your ref pumped up a ball to 16, you find out how and why.
If you're on a fault-finding mission with only one target, you ignore it.
As the NFL* chose to do.
