Here’s a Deflategate fact Ted Wells got wrong

It’s in the Twitter timestamps.

Let the record show that news about Deflategate did not break until after the Patriots had defeated the Colts in the AFC Championship Game. USA Today Sports

By Adam Vaccaro

May 8, 2015

2 minutes to read

Hey, the Deflategate report got something unequivocally wrong.

Granted, it’s extremely inconsequential. And it has nothing to do with what Tom Brady did or didn’t know about the inflation level of footballs. (Look, he may have known.) But the report still got one little fact 100 percent wrong.

The report says:

At 9:55 p.m. on January 18, mid-way through the second half of the AFC Championship Game, Bob Kravitz, a columnist for the website for Indiana television station WTHR, published the following on Twitter: “Breaking: A league source tells me the NFL is investigating the possibility the Patriots deflated footballs Sunday night. More to come.’’ Two minutes later, he wrote: “I’m told at one point the officials took a ball out of play and weighed it. Should hear more tomorrow on this subject.’’ At 11:22 p.m., Kravitz posted a link on Twitter that directed viewers to an article on the WTHR website concerning the issue.

As reality would have it, though, the tweet from Kravitz that broke the Deflategate story did not come until well after the game had ended. He broke the news at nearly 1 a.m. Eastern time, not at 9:55 p.m. as the report suggests. He tweeted a link to his article about an hour and a half later, at 2:22 a.m. (and not, as the report says, at 11:22 p.m.).

See this screenshot of the first Tweet, as it looks from here on the East Coast.

Twitter marks the time of its posts based on the location of the reader. Whoever was reading those tweets on behalf of investigator Ted Wells may have done so on Pacific time and assumed Kravitz sent the first one while the game was still going on.

So anyway, let the record show that the timeline in this section of the Wells report is off. Kravitz didn’t tweet the news until after midnight, long after the last play of the AFC Championship Game. In that paragraph, on page 97, the Wells report was inaccurate, incorrect, and plain ol’ wrong.

It’s a very minor nit to pick. Then again, you might say the same about a pound per square inch of air pressure, too.