Tom Brady Suspension Megathread - Day 4

I'm not the last person you replied to but...

The entire report comes down to the Lynch Pin 'Stress' texts referring to Brady knowing that McNally is probably stressed to "get it done".

I completely disagree with this. The entire report comes down to if anything improper was done to begin with. The text messages are a smokescreen meant to distract from the point that it's "more likely than not" that nothing happened at all.

In order to believe that there's a 50.1% probability that any wrongdoing happened you have to either reject the science of temperature and pressure or determine that the product of the probabilities of all these questions being answered "yes" is over 50%:

  1. Did the Patriots (be it one or more players, coaches, or staff members) want the balls to have the pressure below 12.5 PSI?
  2. Did official Walt Anderson use the "non logo" gauge to measure pre-game ball pressure?
  3. Did Mr. McNally enter the bathroom with the balls with the desire to deflate them?
  4. Did Mr. McNally have time in the bathroom to deflate all of the balls?

Let's say you think the probability of "yes" to each question is: 80%, 70%, 90%, 95%. I think that's ridiculously high, especially for questions 1-3 but let's go with it. That gives you a 48% probability that any violation occurred and everything after it is moot. The texts are all a show.

Anderson says he used the logo gauge. Just based on that and the Ideal Gas Law you should find that it's more likely than not that there was no violation to begin with. Let's take a more reasonable look at those questions and set realistic probabilities:

  1. We have texts where Brady wants the balls at 12.5 and wants the refs to be given a rule book. Let's say there's a 25% chance there's some hidden message to someone other than Jastremski or McNally in his phone saying he wants it below 12.5 in actuality.
  2. Anderson says he used the logo gauge which makes all of this moot. Let's say his memory isn't as otherwise great as the report says and there's a 10% chance he's misremembering and a 50% chance just guessed and didn't want to look bad resulting in a 25% chance of using the non-logo gauge in that circumstance. Total chance of "yes" is 35%.
  3. It's a bathroom. Let's say there's a 50% chance he had to pee and a 50% chance he had malicious intent because you seem swayed by the text messages.
  4. Let's say there's a 95% chance that 100 seconds is enough for someone familiar with handling footballs to deflate 12 of them carried in a bag.

In reality, only question 2 even matter because it can be answered without any of the texts or speculation. It's just that answer plus science which is why I think the rest is a smokescreen. That being said, let's do the math...

Total odds of the possibility of wrongdoing: 0.25 * 0.35 * 0.5 * 0.95 = 4% chance of there even being a reason to investigate further. There's no way to find a greater than 50% chance that wrongdoing even occurred unless you just assume there is and move on to finding a reason for believing that.

/r/nfl Thread Parent