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[Robert] For thousands of years we've looked at sport
to produce our greatest heroes.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
The ancient Greeks to which we owe our heritage,
embraced the idea of competition.
Fair level equal playing field in which and from which,
according to rules, superiority would emerge.
And so, we endowed our great athletes
with great moral virtue, whether they deserved it or not.
We wanted to believe that if they were great
athletically, they would be great morally.
[Jane] Football is the way Americans
tell the story of our culture to our children.
Football is the sport that most conveys what we as Americans think of our own selves
and culture, and how we want to pass that along to our kids.
[Robert] We draw our lessons from sport.
So many of our moral lessons about fairness,
about honesty, about justice.
So I'm fascinated by, then, all of the things around football,
and what does football say about us as a society?
It's the most popular sport by far, makes more money.
The players are somewhat disposable.
There are a few stars, but we really are very happy to not know who
80% of the players on your average football field are, we have major health issues
that come up. Fans are blindly loyal to teams and really aren't all that interested
in hearing about any of the negative things about their sport.
[Robert] Sport has become this microcosm for life.
And so when we find that it's polluted,
then it challenges everything.
It challenges everything we hold dear.
When our great heroes turn out to have
feet of clay, if we discover that they're cheats, then it undermines not only our
sense of who our heroes are and should be, it undermines our sense of self.
If we can't maintain an integrity and an honesty in our play space,
how can we ever aspire to maintain it in our general lives?
In the America I grew up in, that I still believe in, we loved guys
like Tom Brady. A guy who came from nothing, a guy who couldn't even start
for much of his career at Michigan, who at one point
was behind the coach's son on the depth charts.
He's 199th pick in the draft. As a rookie, he was fourth
on the Patriots' depth chart, and then turned himself into the greatest
of all times.
[dramatic music]
[news reporter] And Tom Brady and the New England Patriots
are back in the Super Bowl again.
[Michael] Within hours, there was a tweet by Bob Kravitz.
The NFL is investigating possible ball deflation issues
with the New England Patriots' footballs during the game.
[news reporter] Both Brady and Belichick responding to the allegations
on local radio shows.
[Michael] There was a leak from the NFL to ESPN reporter, Chris Mortensen.
11 of The 12 footballs were more than two pounds underweight.
And that really changed the complexity of the controversy.
And within hours of the story breaking, the National Football
media went completely unhinged.
[news reporter] The NFL has found 11 of the New England Patriots,
12 game balls were inflated significantly
below the NFL's requirements League sources involved
and familiar with the investigation of Sunday's AFC Championship Game told ESPN.
[Robert] Deflategate gets its name instantly.
They caught the Patriots, once again the cheating Patriots.
Now I hope they whack them. They're going to get their comeuppance.
[reporters] Deflategate. Deflategate. Deflategate.
[reporter] From the morning shows to talk radio,
instead of talking about the Super Bowl,
all eyes are on the ball.
[George] You go into that press conference.
And Tom is wearing his hat and everything's fine.
And this is no big deal and, "I didn't do any of those things."
I didn't, you know, have any idea.
You know, I didn't alter the ball in any way.
When I picked those balls out...
at that point, you know, to me, they're perfect.
I don't want anyone touching the balls after that.
I don't want anyone rubbing them,
putting any air in them, taking any air out.
[news reporter] Source is revealing to ESPN, the balls were under-inflated,
two pounds per square inch less than League standards, making them easier to grasp and catch.
[Robert] The press conference immediately following.
[Robert] Belichick essentially said, I can't explain it.
Uh, I had no knowledge whatsoever of this situation until Monday morning.
Mark Brunell cried on national TV because he thought Brady cheated.
I just-- I just didn't believe what Tom Brady had to say.
[news reporter] Source is telling our sister Network, ESPN,
this is the play that led to the discovery of what is being dubbed Deflategate.
D'Qwell Jackson, a linebacker for the Colts, intercepted a pass by Tom Brady,
and allegedly felt the ball was lighter than normal.
[Michael] It led, of course, to the NFL announcing
a quote-unquote independent investigation.
It means that there's a suspicion of wrongdoing.
You must have done something wrong. Why would the NFL investigate you?
What should have been, if to a minor equipment violation, was the top story in the country.
Not on the sports news, on the network newscast.
[news reporter] NBC Sports is reporting the Deflategate investigation
is now centered on a 90 second bathroom break taken
by a Patriots locker room attendant before the AFC Championship Game.
It became a national Scandal of epic proportions.
There were people saying they didn't want Belichick allowed to go to the Super Bowl.
They were talking about taking the Patriots out of the game
and having the Colts go in their place.
[dramatic music]
I want to thank my family and all my friends who supported me,
all my teammates. I love you guys, this is for you guys.
[Jerry] They had Kelly Naqi, a reporter, go on outside the lines
and accuse the Patriots of doctoring the kicking balls in that game.
Adam Schefter came on and said, "Not only did the Patriots not doctor the kicking balls,
but there was a guy from NFL Charities who stole the kicking ball
in the middle of the game and had been fired.
A, I assumed the Patriots did it. B, I was delighted they were caught at it.
C, I wanted them to be guilty and I wanted them
to be punished severely for it.
The bigger picture here, I think, is ethics, cheating,
and keeping the integrity of the game.
The most important thing here is,
was there a violation of rules and if so...
how did that occur? I think at this stage,
what we have to do is let the facts dictate.
This report on Deflategate that took lead investigators
103 days to produce, puts Tom Brady firmly in its cross-hairs.
Always played within the rules.
I would never do anything to break the rules,
um, and I believe in fair play and I respect the League.
[news reporter] But today, an NFL investigation led by Ted Wells found
it is more probable than not that the three-time Super Bowl MVP quarterback
was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities.
You have the Wells report saying that there was a conspiracy
involving two Patriots locker assistants.
McNally and Jastremski coupled with some type of knowledge by-- alleged knowledge by Tom Brady.
It's only been 30 hours, so I haven't had much time to digest it.
After the Wells report came out, about five days passed.
Roger Goodell announced his punishments,
and his punishments were enormous, unprecedented.
Seemingly, not in tune with the actual rules.
They went for this, like-- this triad of punishments.
[news reporter] Brady will not play for the first four games
of the season, this upcoming season, 2015,
will be suspended without pay,
that the Patriots will have a one million dollar fine.
They'll give up their first-round draft pick.
What do you make of this four-game suspension?
These are serious issues.
There is nothing more important
to a Commissioner than preserving the integrity of the game.
[Andrew] One thing that people still watch live on television
at the time it's aired, is NFL football.
[upbeat music]
That audience only sits down for certain times together, right?
It's going to be the Oscars or it's going to be an event,
like the Super Bowl or Sunday when people watch NFL games.
As many as two-thirds of all Americans, uh, tune into at least one football game.
No other property, sort of, is-- operates in that-- in that ballpark.
The ratings are gigantic.
Advertisers really want a piece of those NFL games,
and so broadcasters really want to have
an NFL slot on their broadcast window.
So that's CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN.
The NFL is a monopoly supplier, which really gives them a lot of power in the market.
During the lockout a few years back,
The NFL players Association was denied by one of the television networks
to run their pro-union advertising.
-Let them play. -We want to play.
-Let them play. -Let them play!
[Andrew] If you're one of the television networks,
you'd really like to avoid falling out of
the good graces of the NFL.
I think the NFL and the NFL players Association
is uniquely contentious in the world of...
sports and Leagues versus Unions.
[news reporter] So at midnight, the NFL's owners locked out their players.
The Players' Union dissolved itself,
which allowed ten players, led by star quarterback, Tom Brady,
to file an antitrust lawsuit against the League.
Basically, the owners want to the players to take
what amounts to an 18% pay cut.
This isn't a strike.
The players aren't striking because they want more money.
This is a lock out. The owners are threatening to lock their employees
out of the building unless they take a pay cut.
In 2011, the League ended up taking out a quote unquote loan
from its broadcast partners of about four billion dollars.
[news reporter] The League violated its agreement with the Union
in setting aside 4 billion dollars for itself in additional TV Revenue.
The NFL was effectively stockpiling money to prepare for a lockout.
And that would have been prevented it from
losing money in the event of the lockout, which of course happened.
And a federal judge ruled for the players, saying that this was
a shady deal and that it would have taken that money then
out of the pool of revenue that would have been available for player salaries
and all these other different things.
So, definitely, like, the NFL is
very creative, let's just say,
in trying to find ways to
maximize and preserve revenue.
[Andrew] The NFL's brand has been valued at 24 billion dollars.
That's with the B. Then we shouldn't be surprised
that they're managing that professionally and with a--
in a sophisticated way, in a well resourced way. We may think of
some of the things that firms do as sort of manipulate.
Or maybe tricky. From the point of view of the brand owner,
what they're doing is called public relations.
Look on the internet. You'll see a single phrase appearing
time and again, which characterizes the lockout
as a dispute between quote billionaires and millionaires.
And why the hell are millionaires fighting against billionaires
going to cost hardworking Americans their money and their favorite pastime?
There's a real class divide between the way players are paid.
There are players who make multimillion-dollar contracts.
You could also be somebody, you know, who's the 51st, 52nd, 53rd guy on the roster,
you could be on the practice squad.
Uh, your money is not going to be guaranteed in those situations.
You may be making League minimum which is, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars.
[Andrew] They're-- they're really not millionaires versus billionaires.
When we're given a-- we call this a heuristic
in consumer psychology, when we're given a-- this little mental shortcut.
It's then becomes quite easy to process what's going on,
when it's really a more complex, more nuanced situation.
And this can be quite an effective way
of directing a public opinion.
We want to know that they are considering
the ethical implications
of the sophisticated tactics that they employ.
We want to know that they're-- that they're not cheating.
[gentle piano music]
[Michael] Until Deflategate, the sanctity of the footballs
sure didn't seem like a priority for the NFL.
No one ever gauged a football during a game.
During halftime. No one ever gauged the footballs after a game.
It's not the nuclear briefcase.
Do you know where the-- the 12.5
to 13.5 range PSI comes from?
The back of the box that Wilson footballs are sold in.
That's how the League came up with this.
[light dramatic piano music]
[John] So, I'm a big football fan, but I am a Philadelphia Eagles fan.
I don't really like the Patriots even though I live in the Boston area,
and so I got interested in this story because I thought it would be a really
fascinating story for a measurement and instrumentation class.
I'm always looking for real world examples
that will sort of make science interesting and come alive to students.
What I wanted to do was to try to talk about this sort of
Deflategate controversy, but go back to the data.
There were all these reports about the, um, alleged ball deflation
and word was leaked about, you know, sort of
very large amounts of pressure reduction,
but the NFL didn't actually release the real data.
I was anxiously waiting to see the real numbers.
I was like, "Why can't the NFL release the data? I want the data.
I want to be able to test the data against the predictions from the science
to know what's going on."
[Chris] So the three footballs have been in the environmental chamber for
an hour and 45 minutes, which is about the amount of time that the balls were out
on the playing field before they came back into the locker room.
So they've been soaking it 8.9 degrees Celsius,
which is about 48 degrees Fahrenheit for that time.
We're now going to test them again with our-- with our calibrated
high accurate pressure sensor.
We're going to see what the pressure is now.
This was one of the footballs that was originally at 12 and half PSI.
You see, it's now reading 11.44.
This is another one that was at 12 and a half PSI.
Which is now reading at about 11.34.
And finally... this was the ball that was at 13 PSI.
And it's now reading about 11.96.
All the footballs have lost pressure,
uh, by approximately one PSI, which is exactly
what the Patriots readings were when they were measured at halftime.
I read the report and I have tremendous respect for Exponent and it's sort of
amazing team of scientists, its facilities.
And so I, um-- you know, the-- the first sort of temptation was to just
fully embrace their conclusions in the report,
but then I decided to do their calculations myself
and to dig into data myself a little bit.
When they measured the Patriots' ball on
the sidelines with one of the gauges.
Guess what they measured?
we can look up-- they measured 11.3.
Okay? Now, instead of thinking, ideal gas law,
they thought cheating, and everything went downhill from there.
The ideal gas law prediction is 11.32 PSI.
So, at that instant, if they had known the ideal gas law, they would have known,
"Oh, this is perfectly explained by science."
Instead, they said, "Oh, it must be cheating."
The balls were inflated before the game in a locker room that's agreed to be
about 71 degrees Fahrenheit to 12 and half PSI using one of these two gauges.
All right. And the gauges differ by 0.3 PSI.
Now, that might seem like a lot, but it's actually a one percent difference
in the air in the football to explain a 0.3. PSI difference.
What most people don't realize, the NFL had no idea that this occurred.
And it's been occurring for decades in NFL games.
It's that when there is cold weather, the balls lose pressure, naturally,
the-- the ratio of pressure to temperature is constant.
Now, the trick is you have to use absolute temperature and absolute pressure units.
And for that, we take the Fahrenheit measurement and we add 460.
So, we take 71 degrees Fahrenheit, plus 460,
gives us 531 degrees R, degrees ranking.
The temperature on the field, 48 degrees.
We add 460, you get 508 R.
If we take 508, the ranking temperature in the field,
divide it by 531, the ranking temperature in the locker room,
that ratio, you can get out your calculator, 508 divided by 531...
it's about, if memory serves me, about 95.7%.
0.957. What that means is that
the temperature fell by 4.3%.
So if the temperature fell by 4.3%, and the temperature
and the pressure have a constant ratio,
that means the pressure has to fall 4.3%.
However, we have to use absolute pressure.
So the 12 and a half PSI.
We add 14.7 to get 27.2.
We multiply that by 0.953, the ratio and the ranking scale of the two temperatures,
and we get a new predicted pressure, which I believe is 26.02 PSI...
absolute. We subtract back off the atmospheric pressure.
I'm using 14.7. I think it was like 14.66
PSI, atmospheric pressure at Norwood airport, which is the closest
weather station I could find.
And you wind up, you take the 26.02,
subtract off the 14.07, you get 11.32 PSI.
So the Gay Lussac's law predicts
the ball pressure should have been 11.32 PSI.
Compare those measurements with the--
compare the measurements with that prediction, and if they're close, then physical laws
explain it, and if they're not close, maybe something else happened.
The average of all the numbers from one gauge,
the average from the numbers in the other gauge,
we get 11.11, 11.49.
Let's take the average of those two numbers.
If we take the average of all 22 measurements, we get 11.30 PSI.
So summary, Patriots' balls match the ideal gas law prediction.
The agreement is well within the measurement accuracy of the gauges and the other unknowns.
There are a lot of unknowns here.
It doesn't surprise me at all that the referees who
had very little notice that they had to do this procedure,
that they switched gauges inadvertently
between the Colts' and the Pats' balls.
That the third reading of the Colts' balls
is wrong. So somehow they either
swapped the gauges back and forth, or the person wrote
the wrong numbers in the wrong columns or they might have misheard a number.
[unintelligible] ...They bring in 12 balls normally, and those are classified as game balls.
We have the pressure them, make sure they're between
League regulations as 12 and 13 and a half pounds.
12 and a half. Close enough.
-[air pressure] -Whoa.
[John] So this is a video from something
called the Monday Morning Quarterback website for Sports Illustrated,
just showing how they prepare the balls.
Did they write anything down?
Did they write down any numbers?
Did they take the temperature?
Did they have any sort of experimental procedure?
Did they just say, "12 and a half? Close enough."
Okay? With a sensor that sort of costs 15 bucks and is plus or minus
0.2 PSI accuracy. All right?
In any measurement problem, there's a notion of the margin of error,
it's how accurately do you know something?
And so, in this problem, we have so many different sources of error.
We have the uncertainty in the initial pressure.
We don't know the temperature which it was when he took that initial measurement.
We don't know, uh, the effect of the balls being wet.
The cold, wet water from the ground
would have two effects on the balls. And so people have done experiments
with at Carnegie Mellon where if you make the leather wet,
it expands and the volume increases. So my-- the Gay Lussac's law assumes
the volume's fixed, but if the volume increases, the pressure also drop.
so there could be a three percent drop in pressure
just due to the some of the balls being wet.
There are many sources of error, and to me the margin of error...
taking all these different sources of error,
is much greater than the actual alleged increment.
You know, if I had to stake my reputation in my career on it...
the Patriots' balls match the ideal gas law prediction.
If you look at their data, it's accurate and it shows that the--
what we're going to show today in this experiment, that the pressure drops
when you drop the-- the temperature by as much as we've seen on that game day.
It's all the other assumptions they make and other things that
kind of skew the results for them.
So what I did is I went back to the historical
temperatures of NFL games,
and I made some assumptions, which you know, I'll be very clear about.
Like, if we assume the footballs were inflated in a heated locker room.
And then they went to a cold playing field and--
or whatever the playing field temperature was and had time to equilibrate...
For what fraction of NFL games, where the ball's been out
of this 12 and a half to three and a half--
12 and a half to 13 and a half PSI range,
and it's a huge fraction of the games.
Game temperature...
um, versus the date of the game,
and so I-- starting out, it's going kind of slow. 1960-'61.
And I have it logarithmically getting faster each year.
And so you can see how, like, I build the graph...
of all the game time predicted temperatures. So, over 10,000 games.
I took out any game in a dome stadium, whether the dome is open or not.
And then what I did is I predicted, okay, um, if we started at 13 PSI
in the middle of the range, what would the predicted on-field pressure be?
And obviously, for the colder weather games, as we get later in the year,
we predict lots and lots of games that are well outside the range.
It's not just that the numbers are ambiguous
or there might be some questions about the report...
the numbers prove innocence.
The numbers prove innocence.
[Robert] Some of the issues that I'm focused on were the early issues of
what is a game. What is a sport, cheating,
what constitutes cheating, which would
get us right into Deflategate because...
my perspective on Deflategate is essentially this,
that someone cheated...
but it wasn't the Patriots or Tom Brady,
it was the NFL, that the cheating label
has been placed on the wrong party.
[Andrew] This is the idea that when
you learn a piece of new information
and it comes with a discounting Q,
so this would sound something like, 11 of 12 footballs used in the AFC
Championship Game, were under-inflated by two PSI each,
uh, according to League sources.
So when I say, according to League sources, that means, "Hey, this is early,
there's more information to come. So that-- that functions as a discounting Q.
Now, here's the problem with that, those two pieces of information decay
at different rates, that is, they are forgotten at different rates.
They'll remember that Chris Mortensen of ESPN said 11 of 12 footballs
were under-inflated by two PSI and they'll forget the discounting Q.
[Daniel] One of the very first things that I did
is I requested of the League
and of the League's investigators
that we be provided with the actual PSI information.
That request was refused.
when they finally made the information or offered to make
the information about the actual PSI numbers available...
they did so on the condition
that I would have to agree that I would not share
that information with anyone,
which meant that the false information ended up being
out in the public for over a hundred days...
never corrected by the League.
And when the Wells report is finally issued...
although the accurate information is there...
it's largely buried in a story
that had much more to do with interpretation of texts
than it had to do with the science.
The effect we end up with is that viewers remember
what turns out to be incorrect information.
Not only was misinformation leaked...
but the Patriots the very next day
got an official letter from the League.
And the official letter from the League was also wrong
in terms of what the Patriots were advised
the PSI of the footballs had measured. That letter from a League official,
said one of the balls in fact had measured as low as 10.1 PSI.
Well, that turned out to be false, that same letter said that none of
the Colts' balls that were measured at halftime,
and that letter didn't disclose it, only four were measured...
but the letter asserted, none of the Colts' balls measured below regulation.
That also was incorrect.
So, not only was the leaked information wrong
about the Patriots' footballs,
but both the leaked information and the official letter from the League
was wrong about the Colts' balls.
And unfortunately, what happens with misinformation
when it is not corrected, is it takes on a life of its own.
So, people developed across the country
this view that there must really be something wrong
that happened here, because, look, the Patriots' balls were
significantly below regulation
and all of the Colts' balls were over-regulation.
Outside of New England when people hear,
"Wow, those footballs are more than two pounds under underweight.
They must have been doing something to those footballs."
You have to take a look at, to what degree of cheating is it?
And we still see people talk about it as if it's true, when in fact it isn't.
[Andrew] Layer on top of that,
the idea of the confirmation bias.
While we may think that we are
sort of in an unbiased way, weighing all the evidence,
there are processes going on in the background,
or under the surface, that we're not aware of
that are leading us to a particular conclusion.
There's an element to this of confirmation bias.
Where people are going to believe the thing that they want to believe.
People tend to process
new information through the lens of their existing attitudes.
And people tend to give more
attention to information that confirms
their existing attitudes, and they tend to either ignore
or discount or distort information that disconfirms
what they already believe. Now, this is the reason that
liberals tend to watch MSNBC and conservatives tend to watch Fox News,
because if you're a conservative and you see a conservative treatment
of the issues of the day, that confirms
your existing worldview. Same is true for liberals.
And it's just a much more pleasurable experience to encounter such information.
It's really challenging to encounter information
that's-- disconfirms our existing view of the world.
The fact that the leak contained incorrect information...
in the fact that it's a false leak designed,
it appears, to make the Patriots look guilty,
would make Tom Brady conclude that if he turns over his phone,
information on that phone could be leaked in ways that make him look guilty as well.
Whatever information comes out first
is going to sort of create a baseline
set of attitudes about a particular incident,
and then all subsequent information that comes out after that
is going to be, in general, is going to be processed through the lens of
the additives that were established by the initial information.
In the press conference immediately following,
Belichick essentially said, "I can't explain it."
what was interesting about that among other things is
he never once raises the possibility... that the reason he can't explain it
is because it isn't true.
In other words. He accepts, as given, the figures as leaked by the NFL,
which shows a remarkable trust, and Brady's the same way.
Nobody says at that point, those figures have to be wrong.
Nobody says it, everyone accepts that.
[George] If you're going to cover the League and this is not just
a PSA, but this is just 101, right?
Your skepticism now with how you engage the League office...
on facts and...
information has to be at an all-time high.
Certainly one thing that we know from the political realm is
if you say something and try to control the story
and you say it often enough...
people actually start to think that's the truth.
Even if it's not, even if it's not even close to the truth.
Mark Twain said, "It's easier to lie to people than it is to convince them
that they have been lied to.
I first started getting turned around
when I read the Patriots' response.
Ah, let's see what-- let's see what the Patriots
have the nerve to try to defend themselves.
Come on, you're caught, just admit it.
And I start reading the Patriots' response,
which was drafted by Daniel Goldberg,
who was the Patriots' lawyer.
And he starts pointing out something, some things that are very troubling.
And that don't make sense.
You know, I had this image of the guy sneaking the balls.
He points out, here's this big guy with two sacks of footballs over his shoulder,
the ball locker room attendant, walks out within full view of everybody.
Nobody stops him.
Yes, he goes into a bathroom for 100 seconds,
but the bathroom is on the way to the field.
And he's not allowed to leave the field for the whole first half.
[Jim] With playoff football,
I mean, there's a lot more people that are in the,
uh, the official's area.
Um, there's a lot more intensity, a lot more hype for playoff football.
Just a lot more people from the League office are down there, security, etc..
So, I mean, it's typical playoff football that, uh, a lot of people in the locker room.
If it was so unusual for him to do it,
carry the two bags of balls over his shoulders.
How come he passed by dozens of officials and no one stopped him?
How come he did it again going back in after halftime and nobody stopped him?
A, B. 100 seconds, the rush, why?
The NFL game had gone into overtime, the NFL--
NFC Championship game, which everyone was watching on TV had gone into overtime.
He had more than-- he had plenty of time, why rush it in 100 seconds?
Because if you over deflate a ball, it gets too soft,
can you imagine if he had stopped with,
they issued false figures, they withheld them for us for eight weeks,
they only gave them to us on condition that we not release them
until they release the Wells report.
And then goes through the science that they went through.
How science fully explains:
A, the drop in pressure of the Patriots' balls.
And, B, the greater drop in pressure of the Patriots' balls
as against the Colts' balls, and stop there.
The press would have gone wild.
And then the sentiment would have built and built and built
of the innocence getting screwed by the League.
Instead, he talked about the deflator of the interpretation,
which may even be accurate, but it wasn't plausible.
You know, the ancient sophists knew that we value the plausible more than the true.
So it might have been true, but it wasn't plausible.
And of course it was the subject of mirth and merriment
and it sucked all the attention from the media, right to that,
became this butt of jokes. And late-night TV, that became the headline,
and everyone forgot the attack on the science.
♪ To me those balls are perfect ♪
♪ I can only speak for myself
♪ I don't want anyone touching the balls, rubbing the balls ♪
♪ To me those balls are perfect ♪
A guy named Tommy told me that one of the balls had a genie in it.
I just take a little bit of air out of most of them.
Deflated those balls. Don't believe me go.
I love you, Touchdown Tommy.
It was me.
As brilliant as his counter was,
Dan Goldberg's, and it was, in my view,
it converted me, but it went on to characterize the texts,
especially the infamous McNally calling himself the deflator.
[Jerry] Couple things about the deflator text: one,
it was in May of 2014. In the middle of the lowest part of the
off-season, one idiot sends a text to some other idiot calling himself the deflator,
somehow that proves that Tom Brady conspired
with these guys to take air out of a football the following January?
There was no other deflator text within the--
Right. So, you got May, 2014.
The game is in January, 2015.
There are no deflator text in the interim, you know, part of the reason why
we find the deflator text so meaningful...
is that the name of this controversy is Deflategate.
Right. It seems like a big deal,
because it's the same word.
Countering that, counterbalancing that, in my view...
was the text that never happened.
That was, if you remember after the Jets game,
Brady complained about the footballs,
that they felt like bricks.
And then the next morning...
[Robert] But-- Jastremski, the equipment manager, assistant equipment manager
confirms it, that Brady was right.
Because he measured the PSI in the footballs
and they were measuring at 16,
which is way above the legal maximum.
And what's interesting is in their exchange.
He says, "The refs fucked us."
What he doesn't say is what's so revealing.
He doesn't say, "Hey, McNally, buddy boy, do your job."
If there was an ongoing scheme...
I can't imagine why Jastremski wouldn't have said to McNally,
"Not the refs fucked us, but you fucked up."
That's the most persuasive text in my view. It's a non text.
They've had this sort of series of public relations
crises in terms of the domestic violence problem,
that Adrian Peterson video, you know, the New Orleans Saints with the Bountygate, that
concussions and long-term health impacts of repeated concussions' issue.
[news reporter 1] The NFL attempted to derail a concussion
study, according to a Congressional Report.
[news reporter 2] A scathing Congressional Report issued today,
says the NFL improperly sought to influence
a major Government research study into the link
between football and brain disease.
The League did not carry out its commitment to respect the science
and prioritize health and safety.
[George] DeMaurice Smith was elected Executive Director
of the NFLPA in 2009.
One of the first...
things that we started to recognize
and he really started to realize then, was this
shady science around the issue of concussions.
The NFL has been accused of not turning over
all relevant information related to concussions.
And of course there was the scientific finding of CTE as a neurological condition.
And for many it started to draw an eerie parallel
to another industry, the tobacco industry.
[Robert] This may be the whole explanation for Deflategate.
I'd sometimes believe that Deflategate was something that
the NFL was delighted about, because it diverted attention
from their existential threat, which is CTE,
which is the brain damage.
The evidence for which is now overwhelming and irrefutable.
It faces an existential crisis right now.
Recent research
has revealed beyond any doubt,
of course, that it causes brain damage and has in--
in more than 110 autopsies.
Now, these weren't randomly selected. They were of play--
former players who had shown signs of dementia.
Some of whom had committed suicide, etc.
And now the most recent research is showing not only college football players
and high school football players, but Pop Warner League, youth football players.
We had some concerns about, in particular, the way that they were engaged
with one. Dr. Bennet Omalu, for example,
whose studies were not just ignored,
but they were actively suppressed.
By a group of quote-unquote doctors at the League office
who were not interested in the truth.
At war with one of the biggest corporations in the world.
Bennet!
[dramatic music]
There was a rheumatologist named Elliot Pellman,
who was the team doctor for the Jets for many years,
who was placed on the NFL's concussion board,
someone who didn't have any experience in head trauma,
but had a lot of experience in protecting
teams and in protecting the League.
You maybe know that if a player
gets hit in the head, he's got to go through the protocols.
Well, we advocated for that.
[Michael] It eventually led to
a series of lawsuits against the NFL
brought by retired players.
The Union agreed to
having players arbitrate their health plans
before they can go to court.
And that ends up being a major reason
why the players accepted a settlement in the concussion litigation.
That a lot of people would say isn't enough, because had they gone
to court, had they rejected the settlement and gone to court,
there's a really good chance they would have lost.
We've had some tough cases over the last few years
to defend publicly.
Dog-fighting, gambling, uh, issues of bullying,
drug abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse.
I mean, a lot of the players have been in a lot of hot water.
Collective bargaining is effective
because both parties understand...
what the agreement says.
The language is jointly
worked on, it's jointly agreed upon and it's fully transparent.
The NFL has been criticized for being inconsistent
about how it treats and punishes players
that have been accused of committing some type of domestic violence act.
And this traces back to various points,
but one of them would be the Ray Rice controversy.
In 2014, Ray Rice was caught
on film inside an elevator
in Atlantic City punching his then-girlfriend,
Janay Palmer, in the face.
She was knocked out and then he dragged
her body, unconscious body out of the elevator.
And the first reaction that you have when you see
the video play out is, "This is shocking."
The facts of what had happened
had already been spelled out in a police report that came out in
April of that year, but it wasn't until September
that the video was released.
And when the video was released, there was outrage.
How is it that this player could knock out a woman
and get two games as a suspension.
Now, two games was the usual kind of suspension for this.
But to see it was a completely different thing for people.
There were sponsors that threatened to pull money.
I mean, Budweiser and Pepsi came out
and issued public statements saying that
the NFL needs to get-- get its house in order.
You have a beer company coming out and saying that
the NFL needs to get its house in order on this issue.
And so, the NFL had to listen, because here's this whole pool of revenue
that's threatening to go away if they can't address this issue.
Our Union is there to make sure that the process
of the CBA is adhered to properly,
that they have their full set of rights.
Um, not for the end result of trying to get their fine reduced,
but to make sure that they've had their fair due process
from the time they get the disciplinary letter,
to the time that that incident gets adjudicated.
Roger Goodell handled it appropriately,
because he turned a two-game suspension into an indefinite suspension.
So, he basically double punished Ray Rice.
The NFL sort of ignored what the collective bargaining
agreement had said about how to manage these cases.
Again, not focusing on the conduct,
but focusing on the precedent and the contract that we have with the leak.
So, we step in, we file a grievance on the player's behalf.
We challenge, um, the indefinite suspension
and the second, um, wave of discipline
that the League office imposed on Ray.
Ray Rice was guilty of domestic violence.
Everyone knows it, a video shows it, he went through the legal system.
And yet, he still won his appeal with the NFL.
and that's because the NFL made a procedural mistake.
It punished him twice for the same thing.
And you can't do that in the NFL.
There's a rule under Article 46
that forbids double punishment.
We won that case because the NFL acted unilaterally and ignored,
um, the binding principles,
um, we have in our collective bargaining agreement.
Now, why do you think Goodell dragged this out so much?
Roger Goodell's kind of in a tough situation
with some of the suspensions he made in the past.
So, basically you just suspend the most hated player.
You get some more fan support, some ownership support.
Context matters. This follows...
Goodell losing the Ray Rice case,
this follows Goodell being rejected, repudiated
by his old boss, Paul Tagliabue,
who ruled that the suspensions again Saints players, including Jonathan Vilma,
in the Bountygate controversy, were not appropriate.
So, I think at this point Goodell thought, "I need to really show
that I'm in control, that I'm able to execute a function of my job.
And one of those functions is player discipline.
So I think Goodell probably viewed this as an opportunity to say,
"I'm going to tell the world. I'm actually in charge."
Roger Goodell is a guy who has lied to the world
about wife-beaters. He's lied to the world about concussions,
and yet somehow he comes up with this stupid Deflategate thing
that doesn't add up, and the whole world goes,
"Well, he's got to be telling the truth this time."
You know, they're a motivated actor managing a brand worth billions of dollars.
They know attentional space is finite.
There's been a lot of negative information,
a lot of negative attention,
you know, scapegoating is a strategy
as old as human history, right?
If you can, sort of, direct that negative attention at a particular individual,
uh, that's-- that can often be a way to take it off of the larger organization
or the brand.
Um, so, I think that holds some sway.
Okay, and why do you think Goodell dragged the issue out so much?
I think to deface the Patriots.
I think they've been such a, um, a strong
franchise for so long, and I think other owners and other teams are jealous.
This business of leveling the playing field in the NFL has been pretty effective
for the most part. Teams are able to build fast and, you know, when they get successful
it's hard to stay on top. And the Patriots have been the outlier.
The Patriots' consistent victories over the 15 years were very bad for business.
They obscured two larger markets, New York and Miami.
They essentially-- Brady's continuous stardom...
eclipsed otherwise rising stars.
Belichick created this template for sustained success.
And it's not about spending a ton of money on a few superstars.
It's about building this deep middle class on the team.
Part of the reason he's been able to maintain that
is because Brady hasn't held them financially over a barrel.
Why do you think Goodell dragged the issue out so much?
Um, to tell you the truth, I think it was
a lot to do with the previous scandal in, um,
how they were spying in the Super Bowl. And he kind of wanted to send a message
with this to all the other owners, that the Patriots,
if they get caught with anything else...
then he's really gonna throw the hammer down on them. And I think he did.
Maybe one interpretation of Deflategate is that the whole thing
may be understood as a makeup call.
There were a couple of really powerful long-form pieces.
Most notably ESPN, the Magazine's piece
with Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham.
ESPN is now reporting that the scandal and the drama that ensued
was deeply intertwined with Spygate.
You asked at the-- at the outset, "Well, what motivated-- what got this started?"
And I think, after the game itself, certain League officials were already
saying to the Patriots,
"Oh, you're in trouble, you've been cheating."
Then they hire investigators and they pay millions of dollars to them.
There's almost becomes a certain inevitability that they better find something went on
that was amiss here. Otherwise, they're going to look foolish.
"What does this have to do with football?" That's an obvious
and awful question.
First, you know, I live outside of Baltimore.
I have lots of friends in New England that are die hard Patriots fans.
And my brother-in-law is a die-hard Patriots fan, and it drives me insane.
All right? I'm a casual observer of NFL football
and I despise the Patriots,
and I really don't watch a lot of football, but, boy, I just can't stand them.
But I'll tell you, when the whole scandal came out,
my initial response was, "Oh, great. They finally caught them cheating."
And then I see that the report is authored by Exponent.
And my conclusion, immediately, without ever having read it was,
if they had to go to Exponent. They must really not have a whole lot of evidence.
As somebody that-- that has spent the better part of two decades, um, addressing...
science for hire, and coming across the same organizations over and over...
I found it extremely interesting
that the NFL chose Exponent, uh, to write the report
and that they didn't go to one of the academics that then subsequently lined up
to criticize the Exponent report.
what it provides us with is an excellent opportunity
for anybody that likes football, right?
To have a little peek under the covers as to the incredibly vast and wide
reaching influence of science for hire in our society.
I mean, this isn't just scientists disputing the link
between chromium 6 pollution in Hinkley, California,
which was the subject of the Erin Brockovich movie, which is actually based
on a real lawsuit, right?
It's not just about people who are exposed to asbestos decades ago.
Anybody who likes nachos and beer and likes to watch the NFL,
can look at this and say this is a railroad job, you know, this isn't science.
And this is affecting now, you know, with all apologies to baseball, our national pastime.
So whether you like the Patriots and you're pissed off that Brady had to sit
out a bunch of games, or whether you hate them and you thought,
"Well, they're going to get theirs now." Your life has now been affected by this,
in a way that's concrete.
[Jim] Houston has a lot of oil refineries and chemical plants,
if you've ever been there. It's a huge industrial complex.
So when I was there in the '90s, I got really interested in this
'cause I felt that a lot of these workers were sort of being, you know, forgotten.
They would put in 20, 30 years at some oil refinery
or some petrochemical plant and then they'd get leukemia
or they'd get some other cancer that was known
to be caused by chemical-- chemical exposure, and they would die at 55
Or die at 60, you know, having been loyal to their company for all those decades.
And nobody seemed to really, you know, care about these people.
So, that's when I started to get interested in this.
We've won probably three dozen awards
on my team since I came back here in 2010.
And so just a sort of general knowledge of how things worked
led me to a story about how Ford Motor Company,
uh, which like a lot of-- which like all the major car manufacturers
used asbestos brakes for many, many years,
well into the-- I think '80s and '90s.
Unbeknownst to most of us in our-- in our-- in our country,
there is an enormous industry.
I would refer to it as product defense science.
The example most people are familiar with is the toba-- the tobacco industry's efforts
to create doubt regarding the nature and extent of the dangers of cigarettes.
I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
And I too believe that nicotine is not addictive.
Company X makes a certain product.
Let's say a chemical, it's being sued.
It's being hit with a lot of lawsuits from workers or consumers or whatever.
Or, uh, its product is being looked at for stricter regulation
or even banning by the EPA
or the FDA or the consumer product safety commission.
I need to have experts, I need to have expert witnesses in court.
I need to have expert witnesses who can give depositions
or testify before the EPA.
And it's sort of the-- in my opinion, the reverse scientific method,
scientists following the scientific method come up with
a hypothesis, they collect all the data and they see where the data leads.
Science for hire...
does the reverse of that.
There's a preordained conclusion that they're hoping to get to,
they then assemble the information in the way that
supports that conclusion and figure out ways to explain away the evidence
that doesn't support the conclusion.
In doing that, they can follow...
scientific methods throughout the process
and yet guarantee a result that favors the patron.
I'm going to go to Exponent. I'm going to go to Chem Risk.
I'm going to go to Gradient because, frankly, I know what I'm going to get.
There aren't going to be any surprises.
You know, I'm not going to have
a scientist come back to me six months later and say,
"Oh, I'm sorry, but your product really does cause cancer."
But this is happening not just with tobacco, it's happening with asbestos,
with pesticides, with lead, with petroleum products,
with petroleum additives, with plastics,
you name it. If there are concerns about health hazards,
there are scientists who are being hired by the industries, creating or using
those health hazards, that have been hired to minimize those dangers.
And-- and that's what I would refer to as science for hire.
If you're the power industry and people are concerned about particulate emissions
from smokestacks, from power plants causing asthma
or respiratory problems downwind of the power plants.
You can go and you can find papers that have been written by
scientists hired by the power industry to dispute those links, right.
If the question is pesticides and Parkinson's disease,
you can go and you can find scientists that have been hired
to write papers that either minimize the risks
or that say the existing science is, for one reason or the other, flawed.
I'm an asbestos lawyer.
But when I see the same names popping up
on papers about arsenic and pesticides and lead
and lead paint in toys and chromium and all of these other products.
And the papers seem to uniformly come to the conclusion
that none of these things are causing anybody to get sick,
or that there's not sufficient scientific
evidence to show that anybody is getting sick,
which sounds a lot like the tobacco industry talking to Congress.
You see a lot of smoke, and-- and generally, where there's smoke, there's fire.
The NFL sort of has this kind of blanket denial or minimizing
of, uh, the fact that there may be this, you know, link.
And it sort of reminds me of the tobacco companies
of pre-'90s when they kept saying, "No, there's no link
between smoking and damage to your health or ill health effects."
I do believe that we have embraced, uh, the research,
uh, the medical study of this issue, as you point out.
You're talking about one study and that's the NFL study.
You're not talking about the independent studies
that have been conducted by other researchers.
The whole aim, I think, is to get this,
you know-- is to not only testify,
but the key seems to be publishing,
getting-- getting a paper in a peer-reviewed journal.
Peer review simply means that when the paper is submitted
to one of these scientific journals, the journal sends it out
to other scientists who are not authors on the paper.
They review the paper. They'll make recommendations to the journal,
that whether the journal should accept the paper for publication,
and if they do recommend that it be published,
they will often make editorial comments and say, "Well, this part of the paper is weak
and needs more support" or "Some proposition over here doesn't make sense."
Peer-reviewed scientific papers
get extra weight in courtrooms, because they've gone through that process.
About a year ago, one of my reporters focused on two journals
that are known to publish a lot of corporate funded studies.
One is called Critical Reviews in Toxicology.
The other is called Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.
About half of all the articles written by scientists with the consulting firm, Gradient,
which is one of these firms we've been talking about,
appeared in one of those two journals.
So, it's just, there are certain journals that are known
to publish this sort of science. Until the '90s Exponent,
it was known as Failure Analysis Associates,
but I think it was only after, uh,
say, beginning of the late '90s going up to the present,
that Exponent as we now know it, really made its name
defending everybody from, you know, Toyota in the sudden acceleration cases,
to General Motors, to some of the stuff we wrote about
asbestos litigation. Pretty much, you name it, they've been involved in.
Ford Motor Company was being sued regularly and was losing lawsuits
alleging that asbestos, Ford had used in its brakes
uh, had made people sick with a disease called mesothelioma,
which is a very deadly and rare cancer.
There really is no other way to get mesothelioma, except to be exposed to asbestos.
Its-- there's just a rock-solid length between
asbestos exposure and mesothelioma.
[Jonathan] One of the companies that we come across on a regular basis,
and that was hired by The Big Three automakers in the early 2000s
to write a series of papers about
asbestos in car parts, is this company called Exponent.
[Jim] 40 million dollars later and 15 years later,
we now have all this science out there.
Much of which is published in peer-reviewed journals,
that says, "Well, maybe-- maybe asbestos isn't
mas tightly linked to mesothelioma as we thought.
So again, it's all about raising doubt, raising questions.
Ford and its lawyers can come into court
and they can cite and attempt to rely upon the work that was
done by the scientists at Exponent and ChemRisk, they hired.
[Jim] Scientists with firms like Exponent will tell you,
when you talk to them, they're completely free to publish their work
in Scientific journals, they make the call.
What we found is that, at least in some cases,
corporations or more likely their lawyers,
have a strong influence over what gets published or doesn't get published.
It's the framing of the question, really, that is
one of the signature moves of doubt science.
So the scientists and the lawyers can work together
to decide what question they're going to answer.
Then very carefully keep the question and the inquiry
to that narrow, preordained result.
The balls had to be-- started at 12 and a half for the Patriots,
and then they fell to 11.3. The Colts started at 13 and they fell to 12.5.
And it's this difference, the difference of the differences,
is the sort of the incriminating thing against the Patriots.
How did this happen? The Pats' balls match the prediction...
The Colts' balls are the ones that don't.
Instead of asking why the Pats' balls were too low,
the question is, why were the Colts' balls too high?
[class chuckles]
Okay. You get it?
Manipulation of the control group is, you know, a classic example
of how you can manipulate data without manipulating the data, right?
You can manipulate the conclusion of the paper
without manipulating the data, because if you
compare the-- the study subjects in question,
to an inappropriate control, you can either make a result appear
or make it disappear depending on what's important.
That happened with the asbestos industry,
uh, in the 1950s, with respect to lung cancer
and asbestos exposure. By choosing
an inappropriate control group,
the statistical increase in lung cancer was able to be hidden.
They made some very large assumptions,
uh, the biggest assumption they made was that the Colts' ball
acted as a control for the experiment.
Um, and I think that's completely, uh, inaccurate
or at least there's no way to know that, that's a large assumption.
The League had this, in my opinion, convoluted analysis
where they said the Colts' balls must be perfect.
Let's look at the difference from the Colts' balls.
The Colts' balls measurement times were unknown
and steered by Paul Weiss to be assumed
earlier in the half time rather than later, which kind of defies common sense
if they were running out of time, and that's why they only did four footballs.
When we try and find out information about the link between the lawyers
and the scientists, in general, the response from the companies has been, "This is privileged.
It's work product information.
These were litigation actions that were taken."
Now, none of the disclaimers that I have ever seen in any of these papers
say this was part of a privileged work product between the scientists and the lawyers.
But when we try and get those communications, that's generally the defense that happens.
Walt Anderson had two gauges.
He'd been bringing two gauges with him to games for a long time.
He knew from his own habits which gauge he used
to gauge the footballs before the game began.
And he told the world's reporters which gauge that was.
That ended up being inconsistent with the notion that there must have been tampering with
the footballs.
And so, the Wells investigators
concluded, "No, his memory isn't right.
He actually used the other gauge."
Just use the gauge that the referee remembers using.
Remember, he only had two gauges.
He used one of those two gauges 48 times.
He measured the balls 48 times.
The interview notes would reveal it.
What happened to the interview notes? They weren't turned over.
Why weren't they turned over to the defense?
Well, they weren't turned over to the defense.
The claim is, because they were work products
and protected by lawyer-client confidentiality.
But wait a minute...
those lawyers were supposed to be acting
as outside investigators, that's the way they were hired
as independent investigators, until it comes time...
for the defense to get the notes.
Then it's, "No, they're our lawyers, therefore shielded by--"
Well, which way do you want it?
They were told what assumptions to make
about what happened at halftime...
by the Paul Weiss Law Firm.
And that is why...
the notes of the interviews that the Wells' investigators
made of their interviews of the game officials and League officials
who were present at halftime become so vital.
The Wells report assumed and Exponent assumed
that the sequence was Patriots' balls measured
found below 12.5.
Colts' balls measured, four of them,
found below 12.5 on one gauge
but above 12.5 on the other gauge, and left alone.
Then, all the Patriots' balls are re-inflated.
Those are only three events that happened in half time.
There are four officials involved, two measuring,
two observing and recording, and they can't come to a consensus
as to what are the three events, what the order are of the three events?
That is implausible to the extreme. That's one of the things
that the interview notes would reveal.
They didn't have enough time to measure all of the Colts' balls,
which to me says that they measured them last,
so those balls had more time to warm up.
So the Patriots' balls were measured first, while they were still warming up
and that pressure was still low, and in their own analysis, they show it only takes
a matter of minutes for those balls to start warming up
and that pressure to start changing. So, sure enough,
if you measure the Colts' balls after you measure all the Patriots' balls,
those are warmed up and their pressure's going to increase.
And that easily explains the difference in pressure
between the two balls at the halftime.
[piano music]
-They withheld the evidence consistently. -[clock ticking]
[reporter] So, in these two pictures, as we look at them,
you're saying it was purposeful.
And on under one, they start the needle at the zero point.
And under the other, they shift the ruler
so that they started at the 0.2 inch.
So as to make the needle appear longer to the untrained eye.
Not only do they shift the ruler, not only did they photograph it
at an angle which diminishes the bend...
but they also withdrew the camera, notice...
from a greater distance for the longer gauge, thus actually shrinking it.
So, they shifted the ruler, they shrunk the gauge.
[reporter] One was twice as big as the other one.
-Yes, and more severely bent. -[reporter] And more severely bent.
So you're saying then Walt Anderson, the referee for the game,
should have been clearly been able to remember what gauge he was using.
Yes, should have and did.
The coverage of Deflategate
and Exponent's involvement in the Deflategate scandal
would dwarf the combined coverage
of doubt science in our society over the last 15 years.
What's going on here is not sound science.
It just sounds like science.
I think one of the-- the sort of scary things
for me having done a number of stories
about this topic is that people and-- and even smart people,
even people who read a lot and are just to sort of attuned to things,
I don't think realize how much this corporate funded science has sort of
infiltrated our society.
[Jonathan] The funding for government-funded research,
whether that's done at NIOSH or the EPA or whether it's done by
independent scientists at-- at universities and scientific organizations,
is absolutely critical in our society.
We reported last year that the National Institutes of Health's budget for research grants
had fallen 14% from its peak
in 2004, uh, until 2016.
So as government funded science diminishes,
that opens the door for more corporate funded science.
When that funding goes away, all that's left are the doubt scientists, right?
And there is no more debate, now all we get will be
the industry-sponsored perspective on things.
And that's incredibly dangerous and incredibly concerning to me, right?
But that's what's going on now, as the talk of defunding the EPA
or eliminating the EPA, of defunding OSHA,
of not allowing scientists to take positions,
government scientists to take positions until they've been vetted by politicians.
My concern is that we'll get desensitized as a society
to, uh, you know, fake news or fake science,
and just sort of accept that that's part of life,
uh, because it's not, and it's putting all of our lives in danger.
Cheating was of great concern to the ancient Greeks in the Olympics.
Everybody had to swear an oath not to cheat before the games.
And when I say everybody, that included not only the athletes, but also the judges.
And those who administered the Olympics, they had to swear an oath to Zeus not to cheat.
The Patriots and Tom Brady were punished,
their controversy took two different paths.
For Tom Brady, the path was, he's a member of the Union.
And the Union, the National Football League Players Association has negotiated
a collective bargaining agreement. The key provision in it, Article 46,
is the provision that authorizes Tom Brady to file an appeal.
The Patriots, in contrast, have no such protection.
The NFL system for players being able to challenge
punishments by the Commissioner is such that
the appeal goes to the Commissioner himself.
[news reporter] Commissioner Roger Goodell can either hear the appeal himself,
or appoint an arbitrator to hear it.
Now, in law, we don't do that. We don't say the trial judge
says one thing, but you can appeal back to the trial.
No, you want-- you literally want anyone but that person
to hear the app-- anyone's better than the person who originally punished you.
Under Article 46, the appeal goes to Roger Goodell,
but Goodell has a choice, he can delegate that he--
that role as the hearing officer, and he's done it before.
he did it with Ray Rice. He did it with Adrian Peterson.
He did it with Ezekiel Elliott after Deflategate.
Yet, with Tom Brady, he chose not to do that.
He chose to serve as the hearing officer,
even though NFL referees are implicated in this controversy.
Those referees work for Roger Goodell, even though
there was a false leak from the League office.
It's the fundamental principle of justice.
You cannot decide your own case.
Here, the Commissioner had decided the penalty
and now he was sitting as the Appellate Judge.
In Bountygate, it was also wrong and he was pressured out of doing it.
But here he did it. Now, again, I said the blame should be spread.
They agreed to it.
They being the Players' Association.
He shouldn't have allowed that. That's outrageous.
What we have said from the beginning is,
we should have a collectively bargained process.
Whereby we conduct investigations, the Commissioner issues discipline,
it's reviewed by a neutral arbitrator, and we're done.
-[host] Right. -I mean, look--
[host] But everybody argues though, De, always,
and you know I have your back, everyone always says, "Well, the players gave that up."
Article 46, the player conduct policy impacts
probably about one percent of players.
Now, it just so happens that some of these players are big names.
Tom Brady, Adrian Peterson, Ray Rice, Ezekiel Elliott,
but if you're the Union, you want to focus
in negotiating the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL
on policies that are going to affect all players,
policies like health care, pensions...
minimum salaries affect many players.
Things like that are actually more meaningful to NFL players.
So in a sense, the Union's logic...
is actually sensible, but I think,
by ignoring this particular policy,
it's left players vulnerable. And it just so happens
that some of these players are big names.
We know that we're not walking into a fair set-up.
We knew it, we knew, because we had the documents, we knew.
You are not walking into a fair hearing.
This is designed to get you.
And I would have said that, I would have loved to have said that,
I would have loved to have been more aggressive.
That, I think is a great illustration of how much
Tom believed that Roger was going to do the right thing.
Tom Brady changed the dynamics of the controversy by agreeing
to testify under oath
during the arbitration hearing before Roger Goodell.
The significance of testifying under oath, is that if somebody knowingly lies
while testifying under oath,
they have committed the crime of perjury. It's a really serious thing.
So that just shows how much Tom Brady is putting himself on the line
to say, "I didn't do it."
So I think that certainly lends credibility,
tremendous credibility to what he said.
The Wells report concludes that,
the most that they concluded about Tom Brady is that he was
probably, quote, "generally aware"
of this violation of the rules, supposed violation of the rules
by these other folks. There's simply no basis to say that
some "general awareness" of somebody else's violation
should subject that person to punishment.
So, in my view, the League was looking for some additional evidence of Tom's involvement
in this, to come out of the hearing on appeal.
There was no such evidence.
So the question then that the League faced, if you're going to try to move
from being generally aware to being involved...
what evidence can you rely on?
The only thing that they could latch onto was that
Tom no longer had the cell phone
that the Wells investigators indicated he would never have to turn over.
According to them, Tom Brady ordered the cell phone
that he had used for the four months prior to being called in
-by investigators. He had ordered it destroyed. -Wow.
And when it comes to controlling the story,
then somewhat curiously,
immediately before the Commissioner's decision is announced,
there's a press release from the League which emphasizes...
destruction of the phone. And the reliance of the League.
Well, the destruction of the phone must have reflected his guilty mind.
There's no NFL rule that requires a player to turn over his personal phone.
It's not in any player contract.
It's not in the collective bargaining agreement.
It's literally a rule that doesn't exist.
The NFL can only argue that a failure to turn over
the phone, is some type of reflection of being uncooperative.
I would say, I don't buy that.
Because if it was such an important piece of information, there should be a rule
authorizing the NFL to get it. But it's important to stress that Tom Brady
had no actual obligation to turn over his phone.
I think if it was just about deflating of footballs, then it never would
have happened but, uh...
he hired lawyers and he destroyed his phone.
In his order, Roger Goodell noted that Tom Brady destroyed his phone.
Notice the word, "destroyed." That is a powerful word,
it suggests active,
it suggests a desire to
eliminate implicating evidence.
In law, when you destroy evidence,
you're actually committing a crime.
And it was clearly used intentionally to portray Tom Brady
as at fault and really as having bad intentions.
Tom Brady is as big of a celebrity in sports as there is.
Any piece of personal information on his phone is newsworthy.
Anything. Tom Brady knows that if he turns over his phone,
then anything about his personal life that's leaked will become newsworthy.
He has to believe that there's potential temptation to leak that kind of information,
particularly when there had already been leaks involving the story.
[Robert] The hearing before the Commissioner,
ten hours.
During which, Kessler doesn't lay a glove, really, on the, uh, witnesses.
He doesn't-- when he's got witnesses from Exponent and when he cross-examines,
he doesn't really attack. He lets them go into technical... realms.
He never presses on the sequent. Their goal was to restrict the power
of the Commission.
Their goal was not to establish the innocence of the particular player.
That dropped out, they allowed science to drop out.
They allowed the NFL to draw an analogy between the behavior of Tom Brady
and the 1919 Black Sox Scandal,
which fixed the World Series.
But to analogize Tom Brady
with fixing the World Series, this fierce competitor.
And the NFLPA just let it pass.
And Brady was represented by counsel, at least on paper.
We knew it was a kangaroo court.
I still think he felt like, man to man,
I'm gonna tell the truth and everything's gonna be fine. Didn't turn out that way.
In the Wells report, Ted Wells portrays Tom Brady
as almost a passive participant,
that it was more probable than not that he had general awareness
of a football deflation scheme orchestrated by others.
And yet, after Tom Brady's appeal with Roger Goodell,
Brady's role is transformed
into the architect, the ringleader of this deflation conspiracy.
And it wasn't clear what evidence
changed Tom Brady's role. There was no new evidence.
Roger Goodell introduced a new allegation against Tom Brady.
And the allegation was that Tom Brady didn't share his phone,
or to borrow Roger Goodell's words, he destroyed his phone.
Because Brady was punished without the phone being an issue,
he never had a chance to appeal the phone issue.
It came up on the appeal.
How can he appeal the appeal? He can't.
There was absolutely no basis to make that conclusion.
And Tom ended up turning over, as part of his appeal,
turning over to the League extensive records
that existed about...
who he was calling, who he was texting, all of it.
In his order, Roger Goodell made a very strange analogy.
He compared Tom Brady's alleged role in Deflategate, to a player using steroids.
The problem with this analogy is, among other things, with steroid...
punishments, it-- they must follow a specific set of rules
that go to chain of custody, that go to rights to an appeal,
that have been assented to by The Players' Association.
With Deflategate, none of these rules existed.
Tom is a good guy. And he has faith in
the institutions and the people around him and
I think he really believed that, "No, if I go and tell Roger the truth...
everything's going to be fine, and it wasn't fine.
When the Commissioner issued his decision
on appeal, simultaneously with that, the League filed
a federal court lawsuit in New York.
They anticipated that Tom Brady would file an appeal, as he did.
They wanted to win the race to the courthouse because they preferred to be
in a court in New York, than a court in Minnesota.
[Michael] Tom Brady faced a tall task in getting the suspension
vacated by a federal judge. Federal judges rarely vacate arbitration awards.
And normally, under the law, the arbitrator has to make serious, grave mistakes
for an arbitration award to be vacated.
And yet, here, judge Richard Berman found
that such mistakes existed. Roger Goodell,
according to judge Berman, didn't adequately warn Tom Brady
about the appropriate punishment.
There was no so-called notice. But beyond that,
Tom Brady was never clear about what rules he actually violated.
Was he getting in trouble because of a phone,
a so-called destruction of a phone? Was he getting in trouble
because it was more probable than not that he had general awareness,
according to Ted Wells? Was he in trouble because he was a ringleader?
It was never clear what he was being punished for.
Part of the outrageous violations of due process
is they tried to have it both ways. They declared that they were
engaging in an independent investigation, hired outside independent investigators.
Paul Weiss, their law firm.
Tom Brady never got a chance to cross-examine Jeffrey Pash.
Let's remember who Jeffrey Pash is.
He's the NFL's general counsel, but more importantly,
he's the co-lead investigator into the Deflategate investigation.
And then when it got very inconvenient to turn over some of the notes from
the interviews of that so-called outside investigation, independent investigation.
They said, "Oh, we don't have to ta-- we don't have to turn them over,
they're shielded by lawyer-client confidentiality privilege."
That's actually a big deal.
How can Tom Brady challenge the science,
the core allegation that there was a deflation conspiracy,
when the NFL doesn't share its investigative notes that led to that conclusion,
you know, in science, a key tenant is, you let people review it.
That's how science works. It's not, here's my conclusion.
I'm not going to tell you how I got there. Right?
We don't call that credible science.
And so if you don't turn over the notes to the defense,
they have no ability to cross-examine
and to attack the Wells report, unless they have the notes before them.
So, to say disingenuously, "Well, we never used the notes.
We never relied on the notes, we just relied on the Wells report,"
when the Wells report relies on the notes.
And then to shield it all under lawyer-client confidentiality,
where your-- where your lawyer is
your outside independent investigator,
and yet, in the hearing, then conduct some of the cross-examination.
It's just below the minimum standards of decency and-- and fairness and process.
You go into the text of the appeal, "11 of the full
New England footballs were tested at halftime, all below the prescribed
air pressure ranges measured in each of the two gauges
four of the Indianapolis footballs were tested at halftime as well
and all were within the prescribed air pressure range
in at least one of the two gauges.
It's really kind of crazy, because the balls had to be
below 12 and a half, because of the ideal gas law.
They continued to repeat that right to the end.
Their counsel continued to repeat it in briefs.
That statement is literally true but it is false in context.
It is misleading, it is consciously deceptive,
and it is pragmatically false, it puts the reader out of
working touch with reality. It put the court out of working touch with reality.
[Daniel] In the brief that the League filed with the second circuit,
they said with respect to whether these notes were important or not.
They said, "Well, it really didn't matter because Mr. Brady's
lawyers were present at most of those interviews."
Mr. Brady's lawyers were present at one interview.
His own. Even the Patriots' lawyers...
we were not allowed to be present at the key interviews, as to which notes were sought.
There were two questions he left undecided.
He found for Brady on three and left two undecided.
One of them was the process notes, the failure to turn over the interview notes.
When it went up to the second circuit, the second circuit said,
"Well, we can decide those. Ordinarily, we might remand,
but we can decide these questions right now.
We don't have to send it back to the second-- to the District Court.
Uh... the interview notes are not significant.
No one's told us why they are needed."
That's why I went-- when I read that, I went, "Oh, come on!"
Among the misstatements that are made,
are statements that Brady's phone contained evidence...
that would support his involvement in this scheme to deflate.
That was made up out of whole cloth. And they made it appear that
the evidence of deflation was over-- overwhelming,
and that Tom's involvement was overwhelming.
[news reporter] Lawyer, Paul Clement is fighting back
against reports that he lied to judges
during the League's appeal of Tom Brady's overturned suspension.
And the League, even when this was called to their lawyers' attention,
refused to correct those misstatements.
And that I find, uh, very, very troubling.
It's one thing to...
state your legal positions and, as I say, put the best spin on the--
on the record, but it's another thing to misstate things.
It became very apparent early on that Tom Brady was going to lose.
Suspending Brady for four games is laughable.
For four weeks, Tom Brady will be denied
the joy of 300-pound men trying to kill him.
-[audience chuckle] -Instead, he is stuck with a month
of vacation and nothing to console himself but millions of dollars,
his still valid championship ring and his supermodel wife.
So, the system works.
There are two separate questions.
One is, were the balls deflated? Did Brady cheat?
The second is, who decides?
As the case progressed to the second circuit,
and the science became completely debunked,
what the league grasped onto, well, they tried to divert it to the cell phone,
but what they-- the essential principle that they really clutched on to was,
look, whether or not they're-- the science has anything to say
about whether they were-- that's not the issue!
Facts aren't an issue here.
What's an issue is, who has the right to decide?
What animated the judges was that,
the Union that Tom Brady is a member to,
gave Roger Goodell essentially unlimited discretion
in deciding what happened,
and that Tom Brady was asking for safeguards
that weren't actually listed in Article 46 of the collective bargaining agreement.
Two of the three judges said, "Whether it's unfair or not really isn't important."
What matters is that the Union agreed to a policy
that allowed Roger Goodell
to reach conclusions that you could say, defied science.
So, after Tom Brady lost before the second circuit panel,
he petitioned for an en banc review,
which is where all of the active judges on the court hear an appeal.
He'll fight his Deflategate suspension.
His lawyer's filing this document today,
asking the entire second court of appeals
to rehear his case and toss out his suspension.
They're almost never granted, less than one percent of the time,
and really only in exceptional circumstances.
We don't want to talk about the facts.
We just want to talk about who has the right to decide,
the Commissioner has the right under the CBA to decide it,
Commissioner decided it, end of story.
Commissioner has the right to judge his own appeal, end of story.
Now, the major United States Supreme Court case
that emphasizes that the courts are supposed to stay out of it,
Misco provides a-- an exception to that,
when the courts can get involved,
and that's in the case of evident partiality, bias and fraud,
and there was evident partiality that saturated
the entire investigation in the Wells report
and the Commissioner's decision on appeal.
Bias and fraud in the shift of the rulers.
But again, the Players' Association never played Misco.
[Michael] He was able to enlist the help of the New England Patriots,
who filed an amicus brief.
An amicus brief is a friend of the court brief.
It's not a binding document, in the sense that,
it doesn't force the court to do anything,
and then Tom Brady, of course, got Ken Feinberg.
Ken Feinberg to file an amicus brief.
Ken Feinberg is one of the most influential legal figures
in the last 20 years in the United States.
These are really significant voices.
[reporter] He will not be able to have a rehearing which he was petitioning for...
Going to the Supreme Court for anyone is profoundly difficult.
The Supreme Court only takes about one percent of petitions,
and they tend to be in cases
that are of significant policy implications.
Although Tom Brady's case is certainly of national interest,
it doesn't necessarily impact people across the country.
The problem here for the Supreme Court to take this case,
is that, it wasn't a representative example,
for the court to review the powers of management
to discipline employees,
that an NFL player is different from a regular Union employee,
on all sorts of levels,
including the system of justice that the NFL has,
which is so stacked in favor of the NFL.
Typically, when an employee is punished,
there's a panel that reviews the employee's punishment.
There's usually one person from management,
one person from labor and then someone neutral.
In the NFL, it's the same person that found the facts, that issued the punishment,
he comes back again-- I mean, it's this really unusual system that,
for the Supreme Court to take a case...
that delves into really important issues of,
when can management punish employees?
And what are the rights of employees to contest those punishments?
This wasn't a good case to do.
We also know that Tom had just wanted to stop at that point.
It was just a personal decision.
So I tried to come out here and just focus on what I need to do
to get better and help our team.
Like I said, I'll be, you know, excited to be back when I'm back
and I'll be cheering our team on
and hoping we go out and win every game.
[Robert] Even as we disparage justice,
there is no justice, there couldn't be,
"The strong do what they can, the weak accept what they must,"
there's a part of us that does believe in justice, most of us.
And we look to sport as one of the places to establish justice,
through the outcome.
I got thrown back to the-- [stutters]
the medieval way of determining a person's innocence or guilt,
and whether they had violated the law,
and that was trial by ordeal.
When they didn't have evidence sufficient to either acquit or convict,
there were several ways of handling it.
One way was to force the accused to put his hand on a... [stutters]
on a hot-- red, hot iron rod and then immediately bind up his hand,
and three or four days later take off the bandages,
and if he-- his hand was clean and clear and unblistered, then he was innocent.
The point was that, when Brady refused to engage his own defense
actively throughout the Deflategate controversy,
leaving it to the lawyers to handle it,
and essentially saying that he would settle it on the field.
There's a sense in which,
trial by ordeal was settling it on the field.
[upbeat music]
[somber music]
And we're playing the Falcons.
And as everyone saw, we were getting our asses kicked.
The end of the second half, my mom was defeated.
She's texting my uncle,
"When are we going to get out of here?"
[Jerry] Desperate times. He needs to move the ball.
The clock is running, the Patriots are casual about this.
It's like they're running seven-on-seven drills in training camp,
and you're going, "Does anybody care that the clock is running?"
-[crowd cheering] -[commentator] Touch-down, at last.
Here is Coleman, end zone, touchdown.
[David] One minute left in the third quarter.
We're down 28 to three. Not over yet.
Like, you guys have to understand, this game's still going.
[shouting]
He hits Danny Amendola on a deep cross,
and now you start to think,
this actually maybe could happen.
[uplifting music]
The Patriots catch a break, where the ball's kind of tipped
and Julian keeps fighting for the ball.
He ends up with his hands under the ball and he makes the catch,
and it just didn't seem, like, possible that he would make this catch.
And then, as they put on one scoring drive after another, you felt it all change.
Gotta lock in now, laser focus!
[David] Tom Brady really wanted this game more than anything,
and if I know one thing about Tom Brady,
if he wants something, he's going to accomplish it.
They were able to take everything the NFL did to them
and spin the table and counterpunch them, right back in the solar plexus.
It was beautiful.
[crowd cheering]
You can look into the Super Bowl as a trial by ordeal.
That he would, in fact, make the statement as to his own guilt or innocence,
on the field.
And if we embraced that notion, that you can make a statement on the field,
then Tom Brady made the most emphatic of statements,
in his own defense.
His victory.
Goodell put a lot on the line with Deflategate.
And ultimately, in a technical sense, he wins.
Though I think it really damaged his reputation.
I think it led to an outcome that a lot of people think doesn't make sense.
And here's the thing. Brady has taken the high road.
Personally, I'm an asshole. I like the low road.
The low road is a much easier road to travel,
you get much better mileage that way,
it's where all of my friends are.
I think the best revenge is a life well led,
and holding up another Lombardi trophy,
in the middle of another red, blue and silver confetti shower,
is going to be their revenge in the long run.
If this happened to Tom and the Patriots,
no player and no team is safe from...
the whims of the League office.
I really do think that in the long run,
the truth is gonna-- is gonna win,
and-- and that the facts will come out and people are smart.
Collectively, we're smart.
That's the whole beauty of the jury system,
it's that when you put six or twelve people together
that don't have a stake in the dispute,
that collectively, more often than not,
they're going to reach the right conclusion.
And-- and I truly believe that we can get there.
In this world, we seek justice.
Thucydides, the ultimate realist,
said it best, when it came to justice.
He said, "Justice depends upon the equal power to compel.
The strong do what they can, the weak accept what they must."
In the end, the NFL, the strong party and power,
won their court case.
In the end, the legal verdict is that Tom Brady cheated.
That's the legal verdict.
That's not the historical verdict.
History has a way of getting the last word on these things.
[uplifting music]