New Deflategate revelations reportedly shed light on two mysteries
The source of Chris Mortensen's famously erroneous claim about the Patriots has supposedly been revealed.
Even years after the NFL’s Deflategate saga has ended, new details are apparently still emerging.
Prior to the release of his upcoming book, Playmakers, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio revealed two pieces of new information about the the NFL’s investigation of the Patriots for deflating footballs.
The first of Florio’s revelations pertains to one of the most famous (and infamous) reports that emerged early in the scandal, helping to propel it into a major story.
Shortly after Bob Kravitz of The Indianapolis Star broke the Deflategate story—and that the NFL was investigating—ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported that the league had found that “11 of [the Patriots’] 12 allotted game footballs under-inflated by 2 pounds of air (PSI) less than what’s required by NFL regulations.”
Mortensen’s report came from “league sources either involved or familiar with the investigation.” Eventually, the reporting was revealed to be false.
Florio reportedly learned who Mortensen’s league source was: NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent.
“It makes sense,” Florio noted. “It needed to be someone sufficiently high on the organizational chart to make it credible, and to prompt Mortensen to use it, despite the fact that (unbeknownst to Mortensen) it wasn’t true. It’s unclear whether Vincent deliberately lied to Mortensen. Things were muddled and hazy and confusing in the early days of the scandal.”
The second piece of new knowledge that Florio cast on Deflategate pertains to a lesser-known part of its aftermath. The following season after the story began, the league started doing halftime air pressure checks on footballs. None of the league’s official data was ever publicized.
According to Florio, that was by design. And, taking it a step farther, the league reportedly “expunged” the air pressure records at the behest of its general counsel.
“Per a source with knowledge of the situation, and as reported in Playmakers, the NFL expunged the numbers,” wrote Florio. “It happened at the direct order, per the source, of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash.”
“Why would the league delete the numbers? It’s simple. For cold days, the numbers were too close to the actual numbers generated by the New England footballs at halftime of the playoff game against the Colts,” Florio added, “which means that the numbers generated at halftime of the January 2015 AFC Championship were not evidence of cheating, but of the normal operation of air pressure inside a rubber bladder when the temperature drops. Just as it was expected.”
The Patriots were eventually fined $1 million for Deflategate, as well as two draft picks: A 2016 first-round pick and a 2017 fourth-round pick. Tom Brady, seen as the central figure in the investigation, served a four-game suspension at the start of the 2016 season.
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