Deflate-gate scientists on findings: 'stand behind it 100 percent'
When you turn on the New England Patriots-Houston Texans game on Thursday you won’t find Tom Brady, of course, partially because of what happened in a thermal chamber in Arizona last year.
New York Times reporter John Branch wrote a fascinating story on one of the unanswered pieces of the deflate-gate controversy: How did the scientists at Exponent come up with their findings, which made up a big part of Ted Wells’ report that led to Brady’s four-game suspension?
The scientists hadn’t said anything publicly before, but with the case finished they detailed the procedures used to test footballs for air pressure loss (or lack of lost air pressure).
And while Branch and The Times laid out the specifics of the tests in entertaining detail, the main takeaway might be that the scientists are absolutely certain their finding — Exponent said “there was no set of credible environmental or physical factors that completely accounts for the additional loss in air pressure” — was correct.
“When we released the report, I stood behind it 100 percent,” Gabriel Ganot, one of the four Exponent executives who led the investigation, told The Times. “Having heard whatever everybody has said, and having reviewed the thoughts of the critics, I still stand behind it 100 percent.”
It’s clear, based on the story, that the study was thorough. Exponent replicated everything it could about the Patriots game in question, from the temperature in the thermal chamber in Arizona to “throwing the balls, falling on them, shuffling them out of play, wiping them with towels, spraying them with water to simulate rain” as they watched a television replay of the Patriots’ AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. They couldn’t find any scientific explanation for the balls losing pressure.
And that was key to the whole deflate-gate story, although Patriots fans and cynics would say the NFL seemed on a mission to punish the Patriots and Brady, and were going to do so no matter what Exponent said. But the scientific report had a direct impact on the NFL’s punishments of Brady and the Patriots.
“If we had the exact same report and would have said the pressures are explainable, you never would have heard anything about it,” John Pye, one of the scientists in the investigation, said. “The NFL would have said, ‘Oh, OK, and moved on.'”
There will still be skepticism, and the NFL has brought a lot of that on itself. It over-punished Brady, perhaps as a payback for a Spygate scandal that Brady had nothing to do with. The NFL never released findings from checking air pressure during games last season, when transparency would have helped everyone understand the issue better. The non-scientific part of the report, based on the interviews and text messages, was so flawed (and Wells, who was paid handsomely for the report, came to the conclusion the NFL wanted) that you have to wonder about the validity of the entire report. The NFL throwing out red herrings to win the public PR battle, like the inconsequential issue of Brady destroying his cell phone, makes it seem like the league wasn’t interested in fairness. And other scientists have picked apart the Exponent report, which The Times’ story details.
Exponent’s reputation as a “hired gun” company is discussed in Branch’s story, and that doesn’t help either. But assuming it was telling the truth to The Times, the procedures were thorough and it’s hard to dispute them.
There’s plenty more that can be disputed — namely, how the balls became deflated if it wasn’t natural, and certainly what Brady’s role was in any scheme because Wells and the NFL never answered that question with any facts — but Exponent believes it found the truth when it comes to the science of deflate-gate.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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