I don’t care about how Chris Mortensen chooses to maintain his Twitter feed. Don’t care what his marching orders from his employer are and have been. Don’t care which radio station he speaks with. Don’t care that he seems to have conflated a courtesy call from the Krafts, clarifying who they were most pissed at, into an apology.
Here’s what I do care about though, because it’s disingenuous. Mort’s stance that reasonable folks can disagree on whether the Patriots footballs were “significantly” underinflated or not.
You are either obtuse, ignorant or predisposed to slant your opinion against the Patriots to state that the footballs were “significantly” underinflated. They weren’t.
You could have owned that belief in January when the NFL was closely guarding the actual psi numbers and nobody knew much about the Ideal Gas Law. But once the Wells Report came out, you had to abandon it. The balls weren’t significantly underinflated. Half of them weren’t underinflated at all.
The last frigging day of August and we’re still explaining this?
The Wells Report declared the Patriots footballs were “at or near” 12.5 PSI before the game (page 111). The Wells Report states that “the Ideal Gas Law” predicts that the Patriots balls should have measured between 11.52 and 11.32 psi at the end of the first half.”
Let’s just go over that again so everyone gets it. The $5 million Wells Report states the balls should have been between 11.52 and 11.32 PSI. So that’s your starting point when deciding whether or not the balls were “significantly” underinflated or not.
New England Patriots
So keep that in mind. Now, what was the average psi of the footballs? One official, measuring the 11 footballs, found the average at halftime was 11.49. The other official, with a different gauge, had them at an average of 11.11.
I don’t want to get back into logo gauges and non-logo gauges and the Ideal Gas Law.
I just want to rip apart the idea that one can debate whether or not the deflation was “significant” which is the hill that Mort’s planted his flag on and is making his stand as to why he “stands by” his story.
On one of the gauges, the balls were, on average, easily within the range THAT THE WELLS REPORT SAID THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN. Eight of the 11 balls were not underinflated at all, never mind significantly.
On the other gauge, the average was two-tenths less than what the Wells Report expert, Exponent said they should be. Three of the balls weren’t underinflated at all.
This may seem tiresome, but it really is the crux of the whole thing. Eleven days from the start of the season and the guy who got played by some NFL suits isn’t pissed at them but is instead continuing to parrot their propaganda by alleging the balls were “significantly” underinflated?
And I swear to God, it’s because Mort doesn’t know. The Wells Report was too much work for people to really hunker down and digest. So the "facts" of January are etched in stone despite them being debunked and proven to have come from an NFL that wants a hangin'.
In fact, at the last New York hearing, it seemed to have only recently dawned on NFLPA attorney Jeffrey Kessler how absurd the NFL’s actual claim was. He produced a handout about this, saying, “I call this chart, Angels Dancing on the Head of a Pin.”
More from Kessler, speaking to Judge Richard Berman on Aug. 19: “What this (chart) does is it says let’s look at what the NFL experts said. So none of this is me. What the NFL experts said in Table 11 is, ‘Here are the actual measurements that they believe of the Patriots’ balls at halftime.’ That’s what table 11 is. And your Honor could see, depending on which gauge you think it was, we’ll take the worst case for Tom Brady is 11.09 on average, that’s their average. So giving every benefit of their assumptions, it’s (11.09). Then look at what they say many pages later in their report and I’m quoting their report again, they say they do all of their assumptions for time, for temperature, for wetness and they say these are the assumptions we’re adopting and they go with these equations … and predict the Patriots balls should have measured between 11.52 and 11.32 at the end of the first half. So let’s start with that. Not at 12.5. Their assumptions are it was going to go down from 12.5 to 11.52 and 11.32.
“Then it occurred to me as I’m preparing this argument, how much of a difference is that,” Kessler asked. “And what it turns out, it’s one of two-tenths of a difference of PSI. What does that mean? It means how much do you think we have to alter the assumption to overcome one or two-tenths of PSI? It means their conclusion is, Mr. McNally – the attendant – went into the bathroom to lower the PSI one or two-tenths of a PSI. I would say, your Honor, even the NFL would not contend that a quarterback could even feel the difference of one or two-tenths of PSI, let along in making a difference in play.”
On Monday, the NFL and its reigning Super Bowl MVP go back to federal court for a third time. The seven-month fight about 11 deflated footballs – footballs the NFL’s own experts found may not have been deflated at all – continues.
The question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" for debating useless topics while more vital ones go unchecked.
Inviting people to debate whether the Patriots footballs were “significantly” deflated four months after the Wells Report declared with hard numbers that they were not is asinine.