No Surprise, Goodell Deflects Deflategate Data Questions

Anyone hoping for the NFL to do the right thing when it comes to Deflatagate will likely be disappointed given Roger Goodell’s recent comments.

The NFL Commissioner spoke to the media this week and deflected questions about the matter, dismissing them the same way he did a few years ago after the league conducted their own tests the following season. Reports have indicated the numbers the league came up with were similar to what they found the night the Patriots footballs were questioned, with ProFootballTalk.com reporting this week that the NFL ultimately had the numbers deleted.

As a result, Goodell continues to claim that the tests they did that season were simply spot checks, and he parroted the same responses when questioned about it.

“It’s a long time since I’ve thought about Deflategate,” said Goodell on Wednesday. “… We were very clear that we were going to do spot checks to make sure that people were following the policies. That is something that we fully engaged in, and I don’t know what happened to the data, to be honest with you. We don’t look back at that. We just make sure there’s no violations.

“That’s the purpose of the spot checks — are there violations, and if there are violations, we need to look into it. But thankfully, we did not see any.”

The whole thing remains a farce. When Bill Belichick first found out about the accusations, he ran an internal study to try and get to the bottom of what happened and explained it all in a press conference that remains one of the most epic ones of his tenure, breaking down the exact reasons behind the change in pressure. He even went so far to say he wasn’t a scientist and wasn’t the Mona Lisa Vito (the character from My Cousin Vinny) of air pressure, but what they found was in the range of what the league found.

“I’m embarrassed to talk about the amount of time that I’ve put into this relative to the other important challenge in front of us,” said Belichick, who had to take time away from Super Bowl preparations that week to conduct those tests as they tried and make sense of things. “I’m not a scientist. I’m not an expert in footballs. I’m not an expert in football measurements. I’m just telling you what I know. I would not say that I’m Mona Lisa-Vito of the football world as she was in the car expertise area, all right? And at no time was there any intent whatsoever to try to compromise the integrity of the game or to gain an advantage, quite the opposite.”

“We feel like we followed the rules of the game to the letter in our preparations, in our procedures, and in the way that we handle every game that we competitively play in as it relates to this matter. We try to do everything right, we try to err on the side of caution, it’s been that way now for many years. Anything that’s close, we stay as far away from the line as we can. And in this case I can say that we are, as far as I know in everything that I can do, we did everything as right as we could do it. And we welcome the league’s investigation into this matter.”

As we know, it ended up being all for naught because the league ultimately suspended Tom Brady and docked the club a first and fourth-round draft selection.

Goodell already called Brady a cheater when he insisted “there was a violation”, which he’s likely not going to walk back now. That would require integrity, which seems to be a one-way street when it comes to this matter.

As a result, Goodell appears to be holding the line and for anyone hoping he’s going to do the right thing, don’t hold your breath.

About Ian Logue

Ian Logue is a Seacoast native and owner and senior writer for PatsFans.com, an independent media site covering the New England Patriots and has been running this site in one form or another since 1997.

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