Questions About The Wells Report That Still Must Be Answered
 There are many questions about the Wells Report that Tom Brady's legal team should ask, and expect the league to answer. (USA TODAY Images) |
After an angry and defiant Ted Wells took to a conference call with national media calling out the Patriots and specifically Tom Brady’s agent Don Yee for attacking his independent investigation, while questions continue to surface regarding his report.
"This the first time that after I've issued my report that I find somebody is questioning my independence and in some way suggesting I was influenced by the league office," Wells said, "and I think that is wrong ...”
Wells defended his conclusions pointing his finger at Brady and Patriots employees John Jastremski and Tom McNally. He said it was based on the preponderance of evidence that all pointed to the Patriots QB being guilty of being aware of or ordering the deflation of the game footballs. This is a fact he said despite his conclusions on page 228 of his report stating that finding the truth was not possible.
To Sting or Not to Sting: When asked about the Patriots concerns about the league conducting a sting operation against them, Wells scoffed at the idea, stating the Colts concerns weren’t taken seriously.
"When the Colts made the complaint, no one at the league office took the complaint seriously," Wells said during a conference call. "[The NFL] flipped the complaint by email to the operations people so they knew about it. They told the refs. [Referee] Walt Anderson thought it was just a normal complaint. You get these types of things all the time. Nobody paid that much attention to it.
"There was no sting operation."
If we’re to take this at face value, and no one in the NFL took these complaints seriously, then why tell referee Walt Anderson? If it were not important, why bother the referee prior to a conference championship game. And if it was deemed inconsequential, but important enough to tell the referee, why the Patriots weren’t at least notified that the Colts had made these concerns to the league?
The second part of this equation has to do with the complaint in general. Rumors persist that the Colts first made this allegation after the Patriots visited Indianapolis in November. How can this be possible? If the Patriots were deflating the footballs as the league and Wells have alleged, McNally doesn’t travel with the team, so how could it even be possible?
After the game and initial reports began to surface, the leaks coming out of the league office were coming fast and furious. Dan Wetzel from Yahoo Sports penned an interesting piece on the league’s behavior and it lends credence to the sting scenario.
ESPN reported on the Monday after the AFC Conference Championship citing “league sources” that 11 of the 12 Patriots footballs measured at halftime during the game were found to be more than two pounds of PSI under the league’s minimum of 12.5. That ignited the media frenzy that got completely out of control and where Deflate-gate became the lead-in story of the three national networks.
We now know that the initial report was bunk, that none of the footballs were even close to being that deflated. ESPN quietly pulled that story off the web days later, but the damage was already done.
Goodell Asleep at the Wheel or Worse?: Where were Roger Goodell and the league office to state that the report was false when it this inflammatory piece was igniting a firestorm that called in question the “integrity of the game”?
After all, they claim to ensure to protect the integrity of the game when they handed out this punishment to Brady and the Patriots. They had all the facts in hand. Anderson dutifully made measurements with two different gauges that although each varied widely in pressure, he marked them down and gave them to the league office.
So either we’re left to only assume that either the league cooked up this scenario based on false accusations to defame the Patriots organization by leaking out bad information, which Wells stated was ridiculous. Or Goodell and the league stood by and did nothing to “let the air out” of a non-story by releasing information they already had, which forever tarnishes the legacy of one of the greatest quarterbacks in league history.
Regardless, at best it shows an alarming lack of leadership at the top of the league office and for Commissioner Goodell. At times of crisis, leaders lead. And he failed…again.
Goodell is always talking about protecting the shield, the brand of the NFL. While this was brewing and taking away the lead-up to what turned into a great Super Bowl, all the media wanted to talk about was air pressure and whether Bill Belichick and Tom Brady should be suspended from the game itself. Like Nero, he fiddled while Rome burned. That isn’t protecting the shield, it is an absence of control, good judgment and having the best interests of the league in mind.
Based on Wells, “preponderance of the evidence” argument, it is more probable than not…much more probable than not that Goodell was at least generally aware of an operation to defame the Patriots, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. It is unconscionable and goes against everything that one should stand for while protecting the shield. He needs to answer for this.
Air Pressure Questions (not again?): There are still some questions about the entire air pressure fiasco that don’t make sense. We’ve gotten countless email and texts from our reader forums that ask the same questions we still search for.
First if Anderson found that three of the four footballs Colts footballs were under the prescribed league limit, why didn’t they test the rest? The argument that halftime was ending is ridiculous, self-serving for the league and contrary to what the investigation claims to be about. When the integrity of the game is in question, a few seconds to test eight footballs shouldn’t take precedence over the second half kickoff.
After all, according to Wells’ own calculations, McNally had time to enter a bathroom, lock the door, take a dozen footballs out of the bag, let air out of each, place them all back in the bag in 100 seconds.
Anderson, with other referees and league officials on-hand to make notations, had only eight more footballs to measure, and since three out of the four Colts footballs were already under the minimum PSI, prudence should dictate they test the remaining ones. Or was it an inconvenient truth coming to light? One has to wonder, why that wasn’t done. And you can rest assured Jeffrey Kessler will ask that question.
On the subject of the Colts footballs, were the ones tested used in the game or just sitting in the bottom of the ball bag on the sidelines? It makes a big difference when taking into consideration the atmospheric conditions during the game. We will explain why below…
A Final Question on Atmospherics: As we noted earlier, many of our forum readers continue to ask this question and it should have been delved into in more detail in the Wells Report.
If the pre-game PSI levels for the Patriots footballs were somewhere close to 12.5 and the Colts around 13.5 which were in-line with league mandates, then more parts of the Wells reports again don’t add up.
Wells states McNally let the air out of the Patriots footballs in the bathroom in his report. He would have had to let at least half a pound of PSI out, otherwise what would be the point correct? So if he had indeed done that, then using the ideal law of gas theory the Patriots footballs should have measured in the low range of 10.3 – 10.8 PSI range…exactly what the original ESPN reports stated.
But they didn’t, they measured in the mid-11 to low 12 PSI range which doesn’t make sense. With three out of the four Colts footballs under the league limit, why weren’t the rest tested to see if all of theirs were varying in levels of deflation, in accordance with their amount of use in the atmospherics during the game. It is entirely possible that had the Colts footballs had all been gauged, the results may have shown that the Patriots footballs weren’t deflated at all prior to the game. Unless of course, from a league standpoint that is an inconvenient truth as well.
We would expect Kessler and Brady’s legal team to address these and other questions that are still out there in regards to the very draconian punishment by the league. And once they do, expect some big reductions in Brady’s suspension. Could the Patriots punishments be next?….Stay tuned.
Thanks to AndyS. and others from the PatsFans Forums for all the emails and messages.
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