Problem is they can't. Not with all the science out in the open. If their figures are off it would be so obvious that they really can't fabricate them.
They don't have to fabricate
anything because there's no need for them to.
The NFL has taken the reasonable-in-a-vacuum-but-rampantly-hypocritical-in-context position that they don't care what the pressure of the balls is
during the game so long as nobody was screwing with the balls.
They then came up with a completely reasonable testing protocol given their position:
- Measure balls indoors before game.
- Take balls inside afterwards.
- Let them come to equilibrium
- Measure balls again.
- If balls are the same, great. If not, there was tampering and/or defective balls.
That is an elegant solution that makes perfect sense and simplifies things a lot. It detects the thing the NFL actually cares about -- tampering -- and eliminates the need to measure temperatures, have conversion charts that show acceptable pressures, etc. As a bonus, it is also guaranteed to never produce data that would exonerate NE, so there's no need to try to stop info from leaking, etc. They can tell the actual truth all the time without any worries that they'll be helping NE.
As I've said, if NE and Brady were never punished, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what the NFL is doing.
The problem, of course, is that the NFL is being completely hypocritical about not caring about in-game pressure
now after what happened last year.
To think that this all could have been avoided if the NFL had just left all the AFCCG 1st-half balls under guard until the game was over and then measured them all. Then they all would have measured what they did pre-game and that would have been it.