Major flaws in the Wells report, and my thoughts

This is really cool of you to do. Thanks for your time and effort! The "investigation" certainly looks like they made facts fit around a certain hypothesis instead of exercising critical thinking towards all involved. If this report had been truly independent or well intentioned it would have nixed the cheating hypothesis on a couple facts.

  1. The Refs really blew this. The game officials failed to secure the footballs after being expressly warned that tampering could be happening. Whether or not you believe tampering happened, if your employer warns you about one specific thing, and you do not follow through, you screwed up big time. Secondly they didn't write down the notations from pre game. So all the wonderful data you collected is essentially bogus! That's the hardest part for me to stomach, this investigation rides on one official's memory who has ZERO incentive to tell the truth, "I didn't write them down so this will be hearsay" and every incentive to say "I have a perfect memory here are the measurements". How can any of this be used against Brady when it is so flimsy? This is the base line for whether or not they tampered and it's garbage.
  2. Motive. The report focuses a great deal on the Patriots motive as a means of determining guilt. As in, well we know they want to win and we know Tom wants the balls low so they must have deflated them below the legal limit. When they have statements by Tom and the ball guys that he wanted them at 12.5, the lowest allowable limit. FUCK! Fuck the NFL and their fucking witch hunt.

On the other hand, and to be completely fair. McNally going into the bathroom with the balls looks bad. I personally think he deflated the balls a little to get them closer to 12.5 while in the bathroom. But you can't prove it yes or no because the data is without a doubt flawed. Even before all the temperature and coldness stuff, the data we have is from one guys memory. And again, I suspect that's what McNally did, but did he have enough time to do it? Or to do it in a way that would demonstrably lower the PSI below acceptable levels? We have no fucking idea! This whole thing is one big question mark because the NFL did not properly do its job and is taking it out on Brady and the Patriots because the spotlight is on them. Fuck.

/r/Patriots Thread