Final Word On Deflategate - NY Time

[Jetsfanri]

Simply impossible for a new to cut and paste, but a damning article that confirms what everyone outside Boston has suspected...

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/sports/football/deflategate-new-england-patriots-nfl-science.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

 

[Jetsfanri]

http://nyti.ms/2cQLfMe

Much easier to read online, but here you go.

The Deflategate Scientists Unlock Their Lab The researchers whose work led to Tom Brady’s suspension have never spoken publicly. Now they’re eager to say they were right, no matter what Patriots fans believe.

By JOHN BRANCH SEPT. 21, 2016 PHOENIX — It was over 100 degrees in the scrubby sprawl on the city’s northern frontier earlier this month, but inside the 40-foot-long thermal chamber, it was 48 degrees — same as it was for the playoff game on that January night in Foxborough, Mass. The floor was covered in green artificial turf, like a football field. Through a side door was a similarly stark and windowless space, this one at room temperature, the same setting as the officials’ locker room in Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, about 3,500 miles away. From the outside, the chamber looks like a long storage container plopped on a pavement wasteland behind two seemingly ordinary office buildings. John Pye, a 46-year-old aerospace engineer born and raised in Canada, walked the distance in the glaring light and baking heat of midday and pulled a large door handle, like that on a walk-in freezer. “We’re heading into where we spent about three months of our lives a year and a half ago,” Pye said. And suddenly he was transported to another time, another place, when (and where) N.F.L. footballs and air pressure were all the rage. The 2016 season has started without the Patriots’ star quarterback, Tom Brady, who is serving a four-game suspension for his role, murky as it may be, in Deflategate. Brady and the Patriots were ensnared in a contentious investigation to determine if, for the A.F.C. championship game in January 2015, against the Indianapolis Colts, they conspired to purposely deflate their game-day footballs below league standards for Brady’s benefit. Part of the reason Brady is not playing now is because of what Pye and his co-workers found then — or, more precisely, could not find: a plausible scientific explanation for why the Patriots’ balls were not fully inflated. “I would feel bad if I thought I made a mistake or I thought I overlooked something,” Pye said. “But we made measurements and put the facts out, and it went from there.” Deflategate was a white-hot controversy in the spring of 2015, most of the heat radiating from New England, like solar flares from the sun. Everyone was an expert, it seemed, willing to explain why the game balls used exclusively by the Patriots were so far below 12.5 pounds per square inch, the N.F.L.’s lowest allowable limit, and whether that even mattered. Deflategate swept a nation into debates over science (the Ideal Gas Law) and culture (cheating in sports), from the predictable (Can the N.F.L. be trusted? Can the Patriots?) to the less so (What is the effect of vigorous rubbing on a football?). Arguments were clouded by allegiances and conspiracy theories, reports and rumors. But it was here, in the temperature-controlled silence of a desert bunker, that Pye oversaw months of experiments to try to determine if air was intentionally removed from the footballs, or if the recorded levels could be explained by science. When the results of the N.F.L.’s investigation were released in May 2015, the sports world devoured it. It was called the Wells report, and the first half of it was filled with circumstantial evidence of foul play and delicious components of a great mystery. There was the setting, in a modern American castle, the home stadium of the league’s top franchise. There was no dead body, but a pile of game-used footballs. There was no smoking gun, but there were conflicting pressure gauges. There was a famous athlete linked to shadowy ball boys by text messages that hinted at a cover-up. There were bungling investigators (game officials) and an unexplained bathroom stop. There was even a rainy night. Like an ink blot, it became whatever anyone wanted to see. The second part of the Wells report did not receive the full brunt of attention initially. It was a wonky scientific document filled with equations, tables and graphs, linked by explanations of experimental methods and laws of physics. It was 68 pages, plus a six-page executive summary at the beginning and a nine-page appendix at the end. The title pages said that it was “prepared by” a company called Exponent, of Menlo Park, Calif. Pye was one of four primary scientists and engineers leading Exponent’s investigation. Exponent “identified no set of credible environmental or physical factors that completely accounts for the additional loss in air pressure.” It did not say that someone deliberately removed air from the footballs, but it might as well have. Soon enough, the Exponent report, too, was submerged by scrutiny. With the name of the firm and the men responsible for producing it now public, the attacks came from swarms of Patriots fans, which was to be expected. More surprising, at least to Exponent, the work was pulled apart by other scientists. Several went public with their critiques. An M.I.T. engineering professor’s lecture on the matter drew tens of thousands of viewers on YouTube. A 16-page rebuttal to the Exponent report by the American Enterprise Institute was given instant and wide credibility. (“It is therefore unlikely that the Patriots deflated the footballs,” it concluded.) One of the naysaying scientists who received national attention was a Sacramento fourth grader. Some journalists quickly discredited Exponent entirely, with one columnist calling Exponent “a consulting firm with dubious bona fides” and “a hired gun.” Some suggested the data was made up, a case of “falsifying results” to give the N.F.L. what it wanted, and argued that science “meant nothing in this case.” Exponent heard and read it all and said nothing, maintaining what it calls “professional silence” until the entire matter was resolved. That took more than a year of hearings and appeals and talk of Brady taking the case to the United States Supreme Court. Now that Brady has accepted his punishment and is sitting out, Exponent is finally talking. And it wants everyone to know: It was right all along. “When we released the report, I stood behind it 100 percent,” Gabriel Ganot, one of the four Exponent executives to lead the Deflategate investigation, said. “Having heard whatever everybody has said, and having reviewed the thoughts of the critics, I still stand behind it 100 percent.” Forming the Team Pye was in his corner office in Phoenix when he got a call from New York. It was Robert Caligiuri, 65, a principal engineer who has worked at Exponent for nearly 30 years and is one of Pye’s mentors. Caligiuri stood alongside Ganot, 32, a materials engineer, in the lobby of the Midtown Hilton. They had just finished a meeting a block away at the New York offices of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the law firm hired by the N.F.L. to investigate the fast-spreading wildfire already known as Deflategate. The law firm needed someone to investigate the science portion of the scandal. One of Ganot’s former professors at Columbia recommended Exponent. At the time, Pye was working on a project for Britain’s Ministry of Defense, designing robotdriven Land Rovers fitted with ground-penetrating radar systems to detect improvised explosive devices in the Middle East. “John, we need you to do these tests for us,” Pye recalled Caligiuri saying. “It’s footballs. I’m going to give you some pressures and I’m going to give you some scenarios, temperatures and environment, and I need you to do some tests.” Pye smiled at the memory. “It always starts with ‘some tests,’” he said. Caligiuri passed along the basics: The Patriots’ footballs were thought to be pumped up to about 12.5 p.s.i. before the game, the Colts’ balls at 13 p.s.i. The halftime readings were much lower and varied. The temperature outside was 48 degrees. It was known that the balls were tested at halftime inside, at room temperature: 11 Patriots balls but only four Colts balls, because officials ran out of time. The referee had two gauges, and one was way off. “These halftime measurements, is there really anything there?” Caligiuri said, boiling down Exponent’s mission. “That’s the basis for it.” Pye was still on the phone when he started plugging numbers into the Ideal Gas Law: PV = nRT. Pressure drops with temperature. The balls would, of course, be deflated by halftime, to some degree. “My impression from the very first phone call was that this was going to be an explainable thing,” Pye said. Caligiuri called Duane Steffey, 55, a principal scientist for Exponent with a Ph.D. in statistics. He added him to the team, too. “Is there a real difference here?” Steffey said. “Because we were about to embark on a significant investigation, and if all of this is within the noise level, and within a margin of error, then there’s really nothing here. So that’s the first thing we did.” Within a day or two, it was clear: The numbers were statistically significant. They could not be fully explained within accepted error margins. By then, the public was already debating the effect of that night’s rain, whether balls lost air when they were used, and the fact that the Patriots were on offense more in the first half. New England Coach Bill Belichick held a news conference to suggest that the “rubbing process” might explain everything. “We knew this was going to get a lot of scrutiny, from your eighth-grade science classes to your physics professors,” Pye said. “So we wanted to try to answer all those questions.” The conference room at Exponent’s Phoenix laboratory has vast windows overlooking the mostly shadeless landscape. About 10 scientists and engineers gathered around the room’s oval table and tossed around ideas, which were written on a whiteboard. “Everything we can think of,” Pye said. “Whether it’s human related, environment related, physics related, materials related, including the football and the gauge itself. We tackle the measurements, we tackle the environment, we tackle the inflation side. And we write this all down, kind of group them, think of ways we can refine this model. And then I get back on the phone to Bob. He’s back to Menlo Park at this point, and I said, ‘Bob, we’ve got a plan.’” Caligiuri, a grandfather with a trim white mustache, oversaw everything. Steffey handled the statistics. Pye handled the experiments. Ganot was the go-between, making six trips to Phoenix in the course of a couple of months. Not all of Exponent’s work receives public scrutiny, but Caligiuri knew this would, maybe as much as anything. “We knew there would be controversy here,” Caligiuri said. “And we needed absolutely the best people we could possibly put on it. That’s why I organized it the way I did. I knew the way to approach this — and frankly we had seen the news, we saw the people blaming it on the way he rubbed the footballs and people talking about it and stuff — and we knew that there were some questionable things out there already. So we knew we needed to be totally bulletproof here.” 6,000 Projects a Year The U-shaped, three-story Exponent headquarters in Menlo Park is about 10 miles from where Tom Brady went to high school. It is fronted by a shallow rectangular pool whose primary feature is a twisted, blue steel beam bent into a loop, like an unfamiliar cursive letter. It was part of a 2,000-foot television transmission tower in Missouri that collapsed during repairs in 1988. Some of the falling beams, 35 feet long and five inches in diameter, buried themselves 40 feet into the ground. Exponent investigated the accident. In the lobby are oil paintings of two of the five Stanford professors who started the company as Failure Analysis Associates. The company built its reputation on large-scale disasters — crashed planes, exploded oil rigs, burst pipelines, fallen buildings. One of the paintings is of Alan Tetelman, wearing a bushy 1970s-style mustache and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was president in 1978 when, on his way to investigate a plane crash, he was killed in a plane crash. The company now employs more than 1,000 people working out of 20 offices, including two in Asia and two in Europe. It went public in 1990 (its ticker symbol was FAIL), changed its named to Exponent in 1998 (ticker symbol: EXPO), and reported revenue of nearly $313 million last year. Exponent’s work force includes nearly 500 employees with doctorates. They include physicists, metallurgists, epidemiologists, automotive engineers and data scientists. “Everything from A to Z,” Caligiuri said. “Architects to zoologists. I think we still have a zoologist.” The work is now fairly divided between “reactive” investigations (what went wrong) and “proactive” projects (product development). For the latter, having its headquarters in Silicon Valley — Facebook headquarters is a mile away — was a stroke of good fortune for Exponent. To get an idea of the breadth of companies that have hired Exponent, Caligiuri said, “look at the Fortune 500.” Exponent certainly has its critics. It is often hired by insurance companies and companies in duress, perhaps facing lawsuits and the prospect of monstrous recalls and payouts. And when those companies receive research from Exponent that supports their claims — that says they or the company they insure were not at fault, for example — they often use the research to bolster their case, in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion. Exponent investigated the collapse of the Twin Towers for Swiss Re, one of the World Trade Center’s major insurers, after Sept. 11. It was hired by Exxon after the Valdez oil spill and by BP after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. NASA hired Exponent after the space shuttle disasters. The Department of Justice hired Exponent after the Oklahoma City bombing. Automobile companies routinely hire Exponent to provide backup investigations during scandals, one reason Exponent’s 150-acre complex in Phoenix includes a two-mile oval track, for testing — and crashing — cars and other vehicles. Exponent’s research and experts have sided with the likes of Suzuki (with rollover worries about its Samurai) and Toyota (unintended acceleration). A 2013 Exponent investigation into a long fight over ignition switches in General Motors cars helped lead to a widespread recall. Such public and controversial cases are a small part of what Exponent does. It works on 6,000 projects each year for 2,000 clients. But some have given Exponent a reputation as a “hired gun,” as The Los Angeles Times called Exponent in 2010 — a company that will provide scientific affirmation and gravitas for a price. Exponent staunchly denies that its scientific favor can be bought. It says that it is just as likely that its research runs counter to its clients’ hopes, but that research then gets tucked away, never to see the light of day. “Clients hire Exponent because of our reputation for our independent, high quality, thorough and objective technical and scientific evaluations,” Exponent’s chief executive, Paul Johnston, said in an email. “We frequently give results to clients that are not what they would have wished, which can often be seen through the resulting product recalls.” The first-floor hallways of Exponent’s California headquarters are lined with laboratories, all accessible only with an electronic card. There is a biomedical lab with a bone-cutting saw. There is a fluids lab with a combustion chamber. There is a chemistry lab, a photonics lab, a chromatography lab. There are X-ray machines, CT scanners and two scanning electron microscopes. Client confidentiality is a major issue. To prepare for a visit from a journalist and a photographer, Exponent employees covered a couple of in-progress, large-scale experiments in blue tarps. A 3-D printer in the prototype room was hidden behind paper while it hummed and buzzed. Out a side door, where the traffic from nearby Highway 101 could be seen and heard, a warehouse is filled with objects from prior experiments. Ganot described it as the warehouse from the final scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but would not permit a look inside. Outside, in the sun, the ground was covered in metal parts and enormous gas pipes, some of them burst, all of them there to be studied because something had gone wrong. A car nearby was covered in a tarp, unidentifiable. It might be strange, then, that a company that covets discretion and is known, if at all, for investigating disasters that often kill people and can cost billions of dollars in damages, would want to tackle something as mundane and inconsequential as the air inside N.F.L. footballs. “The visibility of this project fits into some of the largest that we do at this firm,” Pye said. “But when you think about the impact? Meh. Not so much. No one is losing their lives here. The building is not burning down. The vehicle is not crashing. The product is still working. Nothing’s caught on fire.” So why even get involved? “It’s an interesting scientific problem,” Caligiuri said. “It clearly was not as simple as what it was portrayed in the early days. Frankly, it could be controversial, but we are not afraid of controversial matters.” A Gillette Stadium Simulator The temperature inside the thermal chamber at Exponent’s highly secured laboratories in Phoenix can be set anywhere from minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) to 60 (140 degrees Fahrenheit). Depending on the day, it might hold a car or a truck or batteries or personal electronics or something else that someone wants to test for performance in extreme conditions. In early 2015, during the N.F.L. playoffs, it was filled with hot tubs. Then the Patriots beat the Colts and the Deflategate scandal began. Thousands of fans and media members converged on Arizona for the Super Bowl in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, unaware that the cold conditions at New England’s Gillette Stadium soon would be reconstructed in a thermal lab in the desert a few miles away. Pye was in charge. He is a gregarious man with the air of a suburban dad. He did not play football but looks as if he could have. Pye and his wife have a son and a daughter, and their son plays football for the freshman team at his high school. Now Pye can perform a good party trick. Toss him a football and ask about its pressure. “I’ll say 12.3,” he said, squeezing one. He stuck a gauge in it and showed the digital result: 12.25. Pye was born in Kamloops, British Columbia, but his family moved frequently because his father managed hotels. Pye ended up in Florida for high school, then back to the University of Toronto for a degree in engineering science. He earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in aerospace engineering at Stanford. That led him to nearby Exponent, where much of Pye’s work involves robotics and the military. Since 2005, Pye, now an American citizen, has overseen Exponent’s Test and Engineering Center on the far northern edge of Phoenix. “What we do here is the big stuff,” Pye said. Exponent could have investigated footballs just about anywhere. But Phoenix had a big thermal chamber. It had Pye. And was just about as far from New England as could be. “A rule we enforced on ourselves is that we had to control for football-fan bias,” Pye said. “So we specifically did not involve our Boston office.” Ganot went to Gillette Stadium to examine the scene of the alleged football crime. He wanted to understand the space between the field and the officials’ locker room, since temperature transitions were an important part of the experiments. He wanted to examine the room’s heating and cooling system, the reliability of its thermostat, the consistency of the room conditions. The locker room in Arizona was roughly the same size as the one in Gillette Stadium and was set to match the known conditions from the game. Next door, the floor of the “field” was covered in artificial turf. It was not merely decoration. Pye wanted something that could get wet so that when the balls hit the ground, they would pick up moisture, just as they did on that cold, wet night in Massachusetts. The experiments began with the two gauges used by the referee Walt Anderson — one called the “logo” gauge, with a Wilson logo on it, the other the “non-logo” gauge. One gave relatively accurate pressure readings, while the other read significantly higher, adding to the cloud of confusion over Deflategate. Pye’s nine-member team analyzed the gauges and compared them to 50 others of the same model. They tested the potential effects of temperature, various ball pressures and battery life. Did it matter that one had a longer needle? (No.) Did it matter who used them? (No.) Analysis of the gauges consumed 18 pages of the report. Among its conclusions was that the gauges used were different, but consistently different. About half of the report was devoted to “physical, usage, and environmental effects.” Did the balls lose air when used in the game? (According to automated squeezing tests with 650 pounds of pressure administered 1,000 times, no.) Does vigorous rubbing matter? (Yes, but the effect wears off in 30 minutes, long before the officials would have tested the air pressure before the game.) As part of those experiments, Pye set up a television replaying the game in real time. Exponent employees imitated what they watched — throwing the balls, falling on them, shuffling them out of play, wiping them with towels, spraying them with water to simulate rain. “He was the head ball boy,” Pye said, nodding to an employee named Daniel Kingsley. Kingsley shrugged. Unlike the Patriots’ ball boys, he has a Ph.D in mechanical engineering. The trickiest part of the investigation, and where there remains the most debate, was over the timing of the measurements taken at halftime. The Ideal Gas Law and Gay-Lussac’s law are among those that explain how much the air pressure inside something like a football decreases with colder temperatures and increases with warmer ones. The tougher question facing Deflategate investigators was determining how quickly the internal temperature and pressure of the balls would have changed as the environment changed. And while officials recorded the order of balls as they were measured during about 13 minutes of halftime — Patriots’ balls first — the exact timing was unclear. “If you waited forever in the locker room before you took the halftime measurements, they should be the same,” Pye said. “The issue was that it was something less than that.” For weeks, Pye and his team ran tests, ball by ball, gauge by gauge, game simulation after game simulation, trying to account for all the possibilities. In the end, Exponent said that it could not “determine with absolute certainty” whether there had been tampering with New England’s balls. The insinuation was more damning. “We conclude that within the range of game characteristics most likely to have occurred on Game Day, we have identified no set of credible environmental or physical factors that completely accounts for the additional loss in air pressure exhibited by the Patriots game balls as compared to the loss in air pressure exhibited by the Colts game balls,” the report said. “If we had the exact same report and would have said the pressures are explainable, you never would have heard anything about it,” Pye said. “The N.F.L. would have said, ‘Oh, O.K., and moved on.’ You wouldn’t have heard about Exponent, you wouldn’t have heard about John Pye, you wouldn’t have heard about all the things that happened from then.” Three Types of Critics The report that Pye, Caligiuri, Ganot and Steffey wrote could not have a less sexy title: “The Effect of Various Environmental and Physical Factors on the Measured Internal Pressure of N.F.L. Footballs.” They checked it, double-checked it, triple-checked it. They had others at Exponent read it and rerun the numbers. The Princeton physics professor Daniel Marlow, consulted throughout, gave it a final read. Exponent submitted the report to Paul, Weiss, the law firm in New York. There had been little interaction between the coinciding investigations — one featuring dozens of interviews and analysis of text messages and fascinating behind-the-scenes accounts and entanglements, and Exponent’s dive into the science of air pressure. (One exception came when Paul, Weiss asked Exponent if it was possible for someone to take a bag of 12 footballs into a bathroom and deflate them, at least a little, in 1 minute 40 seconds. A Patriots ball boy was seen taking balls into the bathroom on the way to the field before the game, and it became the primary theory for how the balls lost their air pressure. Pye found a small office and had several Exponent employees try. Yes, definitely, he told the lawyers in New York.) On May 6, 2015, the N.F.L. released what instantly became known as the Wells report, named for the lead lawyer in the investigation, Theodore V. Wells Jr. It concluded that it was “more probable than not” that Patriots employees were deliberately releasing air from footballs and that Brady knew about it. It was prominent news. And as people dug deeper into the report, past the juicy circumstantial evidence, and dipped into the science and data of Exponent’s analysis, the Ideal Gas Law had its talk-radio moment. Professors and other scientists questioned Exponent’s findings. Columnists tore into Exponent’s credentials. The “hired gun” headlines returned. Exponent officials heard it and read it all. They remained silent as their reputation took shot after shot. “That was difficult,” Caligiuri said. “There’s always an urge to respond to critics.” Pye put the critics into three categories. One was the unabashed fan who was “going to make the call on feeling over questions of fact.” “That doesn’t bother me at all,” Pye said. “That’s just the world we live in.” Second were the armchair scientists, those who understood enough to raise reasonable questions, usually quickly dismissed. Exponent anticipated them in this case, which is one reason it conducted every experiment it could think of, even if it knew the answers. “We tried to head those people off,” Pye said. Third were Exponent’s peers, the usual audience for Exponent’s work. They are the ones who frustrate Exponent most. “The real world is the real world — it’s not a binary thing,” Pye said. “Binary is a human invention; the real world has a continuum. So you need to understand where your work fits on that continuum. To those people, we wanted to provide enough data so that they could understand what we did, but also understand the significance of what we did. What I found, in a lot of criticisms, is that subtlety, that significance piece, was missed.” Caligiuri was more direct. “What disappoints me the most from the scientific community is they said we didn’t do things that we did,” he said. “And it’s in the report. I believe in the scientific method. I believe in challenging what people say. That’s all part of the verification and validation process. I have no problem with that. But if you’re going to look at what someone else has put forward as a hypothesis, a theory or experimental verification, you have to understand what they did, and then work from there. And I’m not sure that everybody did that.” A rare chance to set the record straight came at an appeal hearing for Brady at the N.F.L.’s New York offices. Caligiuri and Steffey were among the others questioned and cross-examined. “The hearing was somewhat therapeutic,” Steffey said. Exponent still receives emails from adamant critics, and its role in Deflategate has cost it several prospective clients, the company said. At least one in the Northeast told Exponent that it could not risk its own credibility by being associated with the company behind the controversial Deflategate science. But there are no regrets. Brady is sitting out his suspension, and Exponent has moved on. The thermal chamber still has its artificial turf, but it now is testing lithium-ion batteries, not footballs. “The thing that I wanted to make sure came out when we were no longer quiet was that there’s real science here,” Pye said. “There’s real engineering. We didn’t start from feelings. We started from facts — the facts that we had, which were complete to the degree that they were complete. And we took those as far as we thought science and engineering could take them. And then presented that.” Pye opened the metal door of the chamber. He stepped out of the New England winter night and into the afternoon blast of an Arizona summer. © 2016 The New York Times Company

[Dcat]

Of course Brady had those balls illicitly deflated.  Everyone knows that including Pats fans.  The entire denial has been a farce all along.  

Well after week 4, it's finally over.  Brady cheated. Brady then lied about it and destroyed evidence.  Case closed.  Until the next time the Patriots cheat... or should I say.... until they get caught cheating yet again.

[Villain The Foe]

Pats are 2-0. Glad that Brady is serving his suspension, but the Pats are showing that they're more than just a deflated football and Tom Brady. 

Garrapolo put up 240 yards and 3 TD's in 20 mins of play before the injury. That's just ridiculous production. 

[Maxman]

15 minutes ago, Villain The Foe said:

Pats are 2-0. Glad that Brady is serving his suspension, but the Pats are showing that they're more than just a deflated football and Tom Brady. 

Garrapolo put up 240 yards and 3 TD's in 20 mins of play before the injury. That's just ridiculous production. 

No doubt.

That said they were still find for cheating in two different seasons. Not saying they aren't good. I am saying all I will be talking about for the next 50 years is that they are cheaters haha.

[Villain The Foe]

5 minutes ago, Maxman said:

No doubt.

That said they were still find for cheating in two different seasons. Not saying they aren't good. I am saying all I will be talking about for the next 50 years is that they are cheaters haha.

And **** Tom Brady! lol. 

[Jetsfan80]

25 minutes ago, Villain The Foe said:

Pats are 2-0. Glad that Brady is serving his suspension, but the Pats are showing that they're more than just a deflated football and Tom Brady. 

Garrapolo put up 240 yards and 3 TD's in 20 mins of play before the injury. That's just ridiculous production. 

How do we know they're not cheating as we speak, with some new scandalous story coming out about it a couple years from now? 

They don't get the benefit of the doubt.  Ever.  That's the Patriot legacy.

[j4jets]

Final Word? Guilty

[Jet Fan RI]

Yep. From the moment I read the original technical report, I knew the work was solid. The objections from New Englanders were all smoke and mirrors.

[Rexorcism]

Simply impossible for a new to cut and paste, but a damning article that confirms what everyone outside Boston has suspected...   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/sports/football/deflategate-new-england-patriots-nfl-science.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

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[/url]

Wait, wut???

[Rexorcism]

Can we get a statement, Tx?

[Dcat]

35 minutes ago, Villain The Foe said:

Pats are 2-0. Glad that Brady is serving his suspension, but the Pats are showing that they're more than just a deflated football and Tom Brady. 

Garrapolo put up 240 yards and 3 TD's in 20 mins of play before the injury. That's just ridiculous production. 

How is this relevant to the thread topic? No one is saying that the Pats aren't a good team.  Just that they persistently cheat. 

[CaliforniaJet]

Cant wait to find out how they are cheating now. Is it a new scheme, combo of spygate and other things? Stay tuned, we will find out in about a year or two. 

[Jet Nut]

Patriots don't ever cheat.

Belichick just misunderstands the rule. 

[SpartanJet]

My bet for the next chapter in the Cheatriots legacy of cheating will involve circumventing the salary cap and Tom Brady.  His snake oil company and shifty associate "Dr." Alejandro Guerrero have had a contractual relationship with the Patriots for years.  Tom Brady has signed some very cap friendly contracts and given the Cheatriots rich tradition of cheating its probably because of the money being funneled under that table from this bogus company.

[greenwichjetfan]

40 minutes ago, Maxman said:

No doubt.

That said they were still find for cheating in two different seasons. Not saying they aren't good. I am saying all I will be talking about for the next 50 years is that they are cheaters haha.

Not only that; kraft*, belichick*, and brady* are the only owner, coach and player in the history of the NFL to be reprimanded for out and out cheating. kraft* & belichick* twice!

30 minutes ago, Jetsfan80 said:

How do we know they're not cheating as we speak, with some new scandalous story coming out about it a couple years from now? 

They don't get the benefit of the doubt.  Ever.  That's the Patriot legacy.

I'm fully convinced they are somehow circumventing some rule or process somewhere...even now after being reprimanded twice. It's unbelievable to me when anyone talks about Montana or Peyton in the same breath as brady*. 

brady*/cassell*/goropolo*/etc*....they're all just interchangeable cogs (as we've clearly seen no deterioration in QB play when brady* goes down) in the belichick*/ernie adams* machine. 

[nyjunc]

9 minutes ago, greenwichjetfan said:

Not only that; kraft*, belichick*, and brady* are the only owner, coach and player in the history of the NFL to be reprimanded for out and out cheating. kraft* & belichick* twice!

I'm fully convinced they are somehow circumventing some rule or process somewhere...even now after being reprimanded twice. It's unbelievable to me when anyone talks about Montana or Peyton in the same breath as brady*. 

brady*/cassell*/goropolo*/etc*....they're all just interchangeable cogs (as we've clearly seen no deterioration in QB play when brady* goes down) in the belichick*/ernie adams* machine. 

check BB's overall record w/o Brady.  Garropolo and Cassell(who won a div title in KC but couldn't make playoffs w/ previously undefeated team in NE) spent years learning from Brady and Garropolo was a huge pick.  it is not crazy in that winning culture for a high pick to perform well in the short term.  

 

as far as cheating check what Bill Walsh used to do and jerry Rice admitted to using stick um and see what Peyton did in the title game last year.

[Adoni Beast]

Clearly the Patriots have been cheating since little Bill ran away from us and went up to Massachusetts. However, some people say they wouldn't be anything without the cheating. I disagree, but I do think they in all likelihood would have made it to and won less super bowls than they have...especially given the close scores in all their super bowls. 

But it cannot be denied that little Bill, regardless of how much of a douchebag he is, knows how to build a tough smart team. If we had drafted Garropollo like I wanted, he would have been shell shocked and out of the league already playing in an organization run by Rex Ryan and Idzik. Look at him now. Playing like a star. 

For all those people who have been complaining about Petty and Hack, and saying "you either have it or you dont, sitting wont help." Garroppolo is a great example of sitting and learning. Hes in his third year and is playing so well because he knows the system and was taught right. You want to throw them to the wolves, go see Geno and Sanchez.

Patriots will be getting first round offers for Garroppolo in the off season.

[The Crusher]

49 minutes ago, Rexorcism said:

Can we get a statement, Tx?

I think Slats banned him.  I tried the verbal reprimand.  Didn't work. 

[PatsFanTX]

check BB's overall record w/o Brady.  Garropolo and Cassell(who won a div title in KC but couldn't make playoffs w/ previously undefeated team in NE) spent years learning from Brady and Garropolo was a huge pick.  it is not crazy in that winning culture for a high pick to perform well in the short term.  

 

as far as cheating check what Bill Walsh used to do and jerry Rice admitted to using stick um and see what Peyton did in the title game last year.

Come on junc, the Pats are the only team to try and gain a competitive advantage in the history of the NFL.

[greenwichjetfan]

26 minutes ago, nyjunc said:

check BB's overall record w/o Brady.  Garropolo and Cassell(who won a div title in KC but couldn't make playoffs w/ previously undefeated team in NE) spent years learning from Brady and Garropolo was a huge pick.  it is not crazy in that winning culture for a high pick to perform well in the short term.  

 

as far as cheating check what Bill Walsh used to do and jerry Rice admitted to using stick um and see what Peyton did in the title game last year.

Like a moth to a flame...bring up Peyton or brady* on JN and you come running yelling and screaming.

I'm not even going respect you enough to talk about this with you. Just one question: What is your inexplicable need to try to act like a Jets fan on this forum, when it is so visibly obvious that you're a pats* fan? 

At least tx acts his part. 

[FidelioJet]

4 minutes ago, PatsFanTX said:

 

 

Come on junc, the Pats are the only team to try and gain a competitive advantage in the history of the NFL.

When all else fails go with the "everyone is doing it" excuse.  Part of the Pats fan playbook.

[Rangers9]

30 minutes ago, nyjunc said:

check BB's overall record w/o Brady.  Garropolo and Cassell(who won a div title in KC but couldn't make playoffs w/ previously undefeated team in NE) spent years learning from Brady and Garropolo was a huge pick.  it is not crazy in that winning culture for a high pick to perform well in the short term.  

 

as far as cheating check what Bill Walsh used to do and jerry Rice admitted to using stick um and see what Peyton did in the title game last year.

Well, I think you're counting Cleveland. What about NEP only which is basically almost all with Brady. In evaluating BB I think you can toss out his Cleveland record and judge him on NEP alone. You give Brady most of the credit which is a legit opinion. I agree with Tex that it's mostly BB but certainly not as great without TB. The cheating stuff is mostly mental. Ask Belichick's analyst about it. They can win without it. 

[nyjunc]

6 minutes ago, greenwichjetfan said:

Like a moth to a flame...bring up Peyton or brady* on JN and you come running yelling and screaming.

I'm not even going respect you enough to talk about this with you. Just one question: What is your inexplicable need to try to act like a Jets fan on this forum, when it is so visibly obvious that you're a pats* fan? 

At least tx acts his part. 

no none cares whether someone like you who knows so little respects them.  when you post misinformation(which you do often) and I see it I will correct you.

[nyjunc]

2 minutes ago, Rangers9 said:

Well, I think you're counting Cleveland. What about NEP only which is basically almost all with Brady. In evaluating BB I think you can toss out his Cleveland record and judge him on NEP alone. You give Brady most of the credit which is a legit opinion. I agree with Tex that it's mostly BB but certainly not as great without TB. The cheating stuff is mostly mental. Ask Belichick's analyst about it. They can win without it. 

In NE he has 2 full seasons w/o him and has never made the playoffs.

[Rexorcism]

Come on junc, the Pats are the only team to try and gain a competitive advantage in the history of the NFL.

Been anxiously waiting for a statement and all we get is this weakass shlt?

[ghost_in_pads02]

3 minutes ago, FidelioJet said:

When all else fails go with the "everyone is doing it" excuse.  Part of the Pats fan playbook.

Ha ha cause ignoring simple logic is this boards MO.

[PatsFanTX]

Like a moth to a flame...bring up Peyton or brady* on JN and you come running yelling and screaming.

I'm not even going respect you enough to talk about this with you. Just one question: What is your inexplicable need to try to act like a Jets fan on this forum, when it is so visibly obvious that you're a pats* fan? 

At least tx acts his part. 

Why is it when a fan who posts something positive about 2 of the greatest QB's in NFL history, they are immediately labeled a non-Jets fan?

Trust me, I've been round and round with junc for many years now, he is one of the biggest Jets fans out there.

[Rexorcism]

Ha ha cause ignoring simple logic is this boards MO.

[PatsFanTX]

Been anxiously waiting for a statement and all we get is this weakass shlt?

Sorry, I missed your first post.

Anyway, here is my official statement:

"Another dumb article trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill."

[greenwichjetfan]

12 minutes ago, nyjunc said:

no none cares whether someone like you who knows so little respects them.  when you post misinformation(which you do often) and I see it I will correct you.

You very much do. That's why you constantly quote me and respond to me when I have basically tried to ignore you.

What misinformation? What part of calling the pats* cheaters is misinformed? Were they not caught and punished twice for it in the brady/beli era? 

[Rexorcism]

Sorry, I missed your first post.

Anyway, here is my official statement:

"Another dumb article trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill."

[Dcat]

8 minutes ago, PatsFanTX said:

 

 

Sorry, I missed your first post.

 

Anyway, here is my official statement:

 

"Another dumb article trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill."

actually, the article isn't "dumb" at all.  It's professional and accurate per our resident physicist.   It shows how the detractor article presented by the truly dumb Pats fans was completely contrived and a huge steaming pile of inaccurate horseshiit. And you guys hung onto that article like it was gold.  LOL.  All of the Pats' denials and Pats' fans excuses are horseshiit.  Anyway, 2 more weeks until this is finally over.  At least there is no doubt anywhere on planet Earth, even in New England, that the Patriots chronically cheat.  Congratulations. It is settled.  So, what will the next episode of Patriots cheating be?  Any predictions?

[nyjunc]

3 minutes ago, greenwichjetfan said:

You very much do. That's why you constantly quote me and respond to me when I have basically tried to ignore you.

What misinformation? What part of calling the pats* cheaters is misinformed? Were they not caught and punished twice for it in the brady/beli era? 

you have us confused.

 

instead of hurling insults all the time you should pay attention and learn something so you won't look as foolish in the future.

[Charlie Brown]

1 hour ago, Jet Fan RI said:

Yep. From the moment I read the original technical report, I knew the work was solid. The objections from New Englanders were all smoke and mirrors.

You were all over this story from the begining my friend and were willing to call out foolishness from those Jets fans out here who said cheating was no big deal!!!