Kessler questions league’s decision not to release PSI data
Posted by Mike Florio on February 5, 2016, 10:28 AM EST
Getty ImagesThe NFL periodically collected football air-pressure data this season, not to understand the science but to
check for violations of the rules. Attorney Jeffrey Kessler, who has been instrumental in the fight against
Tom Brady’s four-game #DeflateGate suspension, doesn’t understand why the league is being so secretive about the information.
““They haven’t even publicly revealed, do they record temperature?” Kessler told Ben Volin of the
Boston Globe. “Do they record the humidity or whether it’s raining or not? Do they look at any of the information that every scientist agrees you would have to know in order to make any evaluation on this? And when did they do it? Have they done it at the beginning of the games only? Did they do it at halftime? Did they do it at the end of the games? How are the balls selected?
“Right now they are intentionally, for whatever reason,
keeping the world in the dark. And I think the world can draw their own conclusions about that.”
The conclusion this corner of the world draws is that the information would show that, at best, the data collected at halftime of the 2014 AFC title game was inconclusive as to whether air was intentionally removed from the footballs.
“Why wouldn’t you publish it? Why wouldn’t you say, here’s a study? Here’s what we learned from our collection of data?” Kessler said. “But that’s where we are.”
The NFL blew a chance to fully understand a phenomenon that, as executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent admitted while testifying before Commissioner Roger Goodell in the Brady appeal, the league previously didn’t comprehend: Changes to internal air pressure based on the weather. But the league likely realized that a comprehensive study would tend to exonerate Brady and the Patriots as to the question of whether cheating happened in connection with the playoff game against the Colts.
While that doesn’t make troubling text messages exchanged between Jim McNally and John Jastremski any less troubling, the NFL concluded that the Patriots cheated
on that day. A full-blown PSI study would likely show that they didn’t. Regardless of what the NFL would say about it, that’s why the study wasn’t done.