Goodell accepted Exponent’s finding that the full extent of the decline could not “be explained” and that a “substantial part of the decline” was due to tampering. Goodell says that the Brady side submitted “alternative scientific analyses (including the study presented by economists from the American Enterprise Institute)” and, as an expert witness, produced Dean Edward Snyder of the Yale School of Management, described as an “economist who specializes in industrial organization”. Against them, the “Management Council” produced two Exponent scientists (Caligiuri and Steffey) and the Princeton professor who had originally reviewed the Exponent study.
..........
If Snyder’s testimony was as represented, he was a singularly poor choice of expert witness. There are major errors, defects and adverse assumptions through the Exponent report and Snyder should have taken issue with them. Why they wouldn’t have challenged the 67 deg F assumption of the simulations or the apparent gross error in Figures 26 and 30 (at CA here; also at ^ here) is beyond me.
It’s also hard to understand why the Brady side would have produced an expert witness who hadn’t gone to the trouble of doing his own independent analysis. As represented by Goodell, Snyder focused on the single issue of “timing”, claiming that Exponent had “ignored” timing. While there are issues with how Exponent handled timing, it is ludicrous to say that they “ignored” timing issues. Yes, their “statistical analysis” in Appendix A, from which ludicrous claims of “statistical analysis” are derived, ignored timing issues, but timing issues were front and center in the simulations and claims that Exponent “ignored” timing – if Snyder made such claims – are easily refuted.
On the other hand, Goodell and Exponent’s characterization are always shadow boxing with reality. Goodell said :” Dr Caligiuri and Dr Steffey both explained how timing was, in fact, taken into account in both their experimental and statisticalanalysis. ” This isn’t true either. Timing was taken into account in their experimental analysis, but not in the statistical analysis (in Appendix A). (By the way, I haven’t written except in passing about the statistical analysis in Appendix A as the simulations seemed to me to be the core of the prosecution case, while the statistical analysis was so stupidly irrelevant and pointless as to be worthless, but the fact that it is referred to here as a factor in the decision may cause me to revisit this.)
One of the most important, if not the most important, arguments in trying to make sense of events was the scenario in which referee Anderson used the Logo gauge for measuring Patriot balls and the Non-Logo gauge for measuring Colt balls, inattentively changing gauges between measurements – as NFL officials also did during half-time, despite the heightened scrutiny. This scenario neatly reconciles a lot of otherwise discordant information, as discussed in previous posts. This scenario was raised in the AEI article as well and in an early response by the Patriots. If Goodell has correctly characterized evidence from Snyder and the NFLPA, they botched this issue as well. According to Goodell, they argued that Anderson had used the Logo gauge for measuring both Patriot and Colt balls, raising the problem of the approximate pregame match of Colt pressures and Anderson’s measurements. This argument is moot if, as seems entirely possible, Anderson inattentively changed gauges. Then the issue is how Anderson’s pregame measurement of Patriot balls (if done with Logo gauge) could have reconciled with Patriot pregame measurements. On this narrower issue, there are a couple of possibilities: (1) the Patriot (Jastremski) gauge might have had a similar bias to Anderson’s Logo gauge. Exponent’s analysis of gauge variation is wildly irrelevant to the problem as they limited their analysis to other examples of new Non-Logo gauges. Also, the NFL appears to have been in possession of the Jastremski gauge at half-time and could have tested its calibration, but it didn’t do so, apparently not keeping track of the gauge. (2) while Exponent has plausibly shown that the additional pressure arising from Patriot gloving protocols would have worn off by the time of Anderson’s measurements, it also appears possible that Patriot pregame measurements were done while the balls were still impacted by gloving.
.
