Dissing Brady
After Brady complained about the footballs used in the Jets game, Jastremski texted Jim McNally, a part-time employee who was responsible for delivering the balls to the officials and overseeing their final check of the air pressure, when the officials might add more air or remove some to get within the 12.5 psi to 13.5 psi parameters.
In effect, Jastremski was chastising McNally for not doing his job properly -- and McNally responded defensively, threatening to make sure the balls were even more over-inflated in the next game.
"Tom sucks," McNally texted. "im going make that next ball a fuckin balloon," adding: "f*ck tom ... 16 [psi] is nothing ... wait till next Sunday."
In another exchange, McNally wrote, "f*ck tom ...make sure the pump is attached to the needle... fuckin watermelons coming...The only thing deflating sun[day] ... is his passing rating."
According to the Wells report, Jastremski and McNally called these comments joking banter, but Wells detected something more sinister. But these exchanges were about over-inflating balls to punish Brady -- not under-inflating the balls to please Brady. The comments also occurred in the context of a game in which the only violation was by the NFL officials exceeding the upper limit for air pressure.
In other words, if McNally was already assigned by Brady to under-inflate the balls (as Wells insinuates in his report), McNally wasn't doing his job very well. Indeed, a fair reading of the text messages would be that there was no scheme to deflate footballs -- at least not then -- and that any subsequent tampering (if any happened at all) may have been a reaction to the illegal over-inflating by the NFL officials.
It might make sense that McNally and Jastremski -- afraid of losing their jobs -- could have taken steps to prevent some future over-inflation of footballs, as had happened in the Jets game, to avoid Brady's future wrath, which could cost them their employment. In that case, it's conceivable that they might have devised a scheme to let air out if McNally witnessed the officials putting too much air in.
Before the AFC Championship game, referee Walt Anderson did add air to some of the Patriots footballs while McNally pleaded with him to keep the levels at around 12.5 psi where Brady liked them. McNally might have thought that Anderson had ignored him.
Precepts of Justice
But whatever McNally may or may not have done to the footballs in the bathroom on the way to the playing field, there's no particular reason to think that Brady was in on it. While that is possible, a basic precept of American justice is not to punish someone for what may or may not have happened with the further uncertainty that whatever did or didn't happen, they might have been in on it or not.
Yes, I know, all the talking heads confidently declare that two locker room attendants would not have acted without Brady's instructions or blessing. But is it normal for a locker room attendant to express in text messages such contempt for the star quarterback and even a willingness to defy his wishes, whether jokingly or not?
Since Brady had made it emphatically clear that he wanted the footballs at the low end of the permissible psi range, around 12.5, is it inconceivable that McNally and Jastremski took it from there? You can speculate otherwise, but that's a core problem with the Wells report. It piles speculation onto speculation based on a foundation of scientific uncertainty.
There is no hard evidence that anything happened, only the murky scientific analysis of the halftime testing of the footballs in which the many possible variables do not exclude that the deflation of the footballs -- for both the Patriots and the Colts -- resulted from the chilly, rainy weather plus the pre-game treatment applied to the balls, not from illegal tampering.
So, there was a fairer way to write the report. Wells might have noted that for something as central to the National Football League as footballs, there are confusing and contradictory protocols for ensuring that footballs are maintained in a way that best serves the game.
Wells could have noted that the careless manner in which NFL officials over-inflated the Patriots balls in the Jets game may have been a contributing factor to whatever may have happened in the AFC Championship game. He could have called on officials to be more careful in this preparation.
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