A caller on WFAN 660 this evening hinted at what I believe to be the most plausible explanation for #DeflateGate.
Summary: The refs never measured (or set) the PSI of the balls before the game. Or, if they did, they only did so for a couple balls, but not all. The footballs were delivered to the refs under inflated and left the refs under inflated.
This idea reconciles the Brady narrative, the Belichik narrative, the Kraft Godfather 2 “This committee owes an apology, Senator” bit and, crucially, the delay on the part of the NFL in announcing something. It reconciles Bill Nye the Science Guy. It also fixes the problem that the deflation (or, perhaps more correctly, the lack of inflation) would have been much more easily done before inspection than after.
Essentially the theory is that the balls were prepared in the elaborate way, focused on feel, that Belichick went into at the Sunday presser. The theory further holds that the Patriots never measured the PSI of the balls before they were handed to the refs. The Patriots prepared the balls based on feel – I never heard Belichick say that the Patriots themselves checked the balls’s PSI before handing them to the referees on game day.
A critical quote from BB: “When the balls are delivered to the officials’ locker room, the officials were asked to inflate them to 12.5 PSI. What exactly they did, I don’t know.”
He continued “But for the purposes of our study, that’s what we did. We set them at 12.5. That’s at the discretion of the official, though. Regardless of what we ask for, it’s the official’s discretion to put them where he wants.”
This implies that 1) on game day the Patriots ball crew was not in the habit of checking the PSI – this was something new they did for the “study”, and 2) that the refs are not only supposed to check the balls but also inflate them (or, conversely, deflate them in Aaron Rodgers’ case) as needed to make them in compliance. The burden of checking and preserving inflation lies with the refs. This MMQB article and video seems to back that up, including a video of the process: http://mmqb.si.com/2015/01/22/deflategate-video-how-nfl-officials-check-game-ball-pressure/
The implied theory of the caller and my now working theory: the refs examined some of the balls, mostly by hand. If they checked any balls with a gauge, it was only a couple (essentially a sample). It was fewer still, if any, that they further inflated based on readings.
Simply put, the auditors – the refs – dropped the ball. They were sloppy. A rigorous check of all 12 balls never happened. The balls were under inflated all along. Perhaps the footballs further deflated during the game due to atmospheric condition, but that’s a margin of error stuff.
This brings up a question around “sin of omission”, i.e., should the Patriots have checked the PSI of the balls before they were handed over to the refs? So far as I can tell, teams are not obligated to hand over balls they are certain are above 12.5 PSI (read the official rules about balls yourself at http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/image/rulebook/pdfs/5_2013_Ball.pdf) and if they were, there would have to some margin for error before a penalty is issued – would a team handing the referees one ball of twelve at 12.4 PSI to inspect be penalized just as much as a team handing a ref 12 balls at 10 PSI? It sounds like a team could hand the ref fully deflated balls if they’d like – the burden of checking AND inflation lies with the referees.
Let’s assume that giving under-inflated balls to the refs to inspect is not a violation. If that is so, were the Patriots “gaming” the system by purposely giving balls that “felt” right but in fact were objectively a little under-inflated to the refs in the hope they’d pass inspection? Were they seeing what they could get away with? Or was this simply the process they had always followed, focusing on feel and not the PSI, leaving the PSI up to the refs? That’s the area where interpretation of intent and motive may lie.
But I think this is what happened.