Science is Hard. But the Truth Always Wins

Seven years later, it’s clear we didn’t learn much from Tom Brady's football deflation saga. Science, media, and the madness of crowds.

Remember Deflategate? Seven years later, it’s clear we didn’t learn much from Tom Brady’s football deflation saga. I’m a pretty big Pats fan. Yes, that makes me a huge Tom Brady fan as well. One of the great things about being in my 30’s and having a kid is I don’t have as much time to be bothered by sports related soap operas anymore. Think my team and coach are habitual cheaters? Cool. I couldn’t care less about your football fandom tears.

Seven years ago though? Boy did I care. I cared so much that simply kicking everyone’s butt every Sunday wasn’t enough. I wanted my team to win every week and also be respected for the freight train juggernaut that it was. Ah the naïveté of a twenty-something. I always knew why most Americans hated the Patriots. Because they always won. More than that, they usually won big. They usually did it with cast-offs from other teams. And well into a second decade of conference dominance, the Pats largely took away excuses from perpetual loser franchises and fanbases. The Patriots were easy to hate. But hate Tom Brady? That just seemed silly.

While many generational NFL talents are selected near the top of their NFL drafts, Tom Brady almost didn’t get picked at all during his. When many generational NFL talents get the maximum amount they possibly can out of their salaries, Tom Brady always left millions on the table annually so that cap money could be spent on his teammates. Who could actually hate Tom Brady? To me, those who hated Tom Brady hated him because they were haters. Simple. They hated his rings. They hated his handsome face. They hated his super model wife. Haters.

Then deflated footballs became a national news story that transcended sports. After getting thoroughly massacred by New England in the 2014 AFC Championship game, the Indianapolis Colts accused the Patriots of intentionally deflating their footballs below the allowable limit. This would, in theory, make the balls easier to control and less likely to be fumbled. Essentially a competitive edge that was very much against the rules as the balls had to be within a certain pounds per square inch (PSI) window to be compliant with league policy.

This scandal though, unlike Spygate before it, pointed blame squarely at the QB. Suddenly, the haters seemingly had a legitimate reason to hate Tommy and the mainstream bubble heads pounced on the opportunity. Deflategate was the lead story shared on all the major broadcast television networks. Even Bill Nye was pretending he understood what happened. If you’re familiar with this story, you may know where I’m going with this. If you actually still think Tom Brady ran a ball deflation scheme at home games and prefer to protect that fantasy in your mind, stop reading this article.

A few days after the allegations came out, Patriots head coach Bill Belichick ran his own experiment. He had his staff run a simulation of game-day ball prep to see if he could replicate the deflation seen during the previous game against Indy. It turned out, he came close and held a press conference sharing his findings. Given Belichick’s reputation as a no-nonsense, no time for shenanigans curmudgeon, it was my belief that the effort Belichick put into defending his QB meant he believed him. That was good enough for me.

I tried to make it my mission to defend Tom during the Deflategate saga. I watched videos about the ideal gas law. I read the entire transcript from Brady’s suspension appeal. I poked holes in red herring arguments. I shared numerous other instances of equipment-related infractions in the league that nobody cared about to prove the hypocrisy. None of it mattered. A media with an agenda is tough to overcome. Years of winning and avoiding controversial soundbites came back to bite Brady and there was nothing I could do to change minds that didn’t want to be changed.

The league spent millions of dollars on an investigation; hiring Ted Wells and the famed science-ish research firm Exponent for the scientific “findings” from that investigation. Not familiar with Exponent? It’s the same firm that proved secondhand smoke doesn’t cause cancer in a study funded by big tobacco. No, I’m not joking.

The Wells Report eventually dropped with the main takeaway being it was “more probable than not” that Brady had involvement in a scheme to deflate footballs. Ideal Gas Law? Forget about it. The public ate it up. Speculation from the peanut gallery was that Tom’s equipment manager was taking the big bag of footballs into a bathroom after the official pre-game measurements and indiscriminately deflating them with a gauge needle in roughly a minute before heading out to the field with under-inflated balls. Just the way Tom liked them. Or something like that.

What really happened? Probably nothing actually. The equipment manager’s visit to the bathroom was likely just his opportunity to take a whiz before the game. The massive discrepancy in PSI levels between the Patriots’ footballs and the Colts’ footballs can be explained away by the Ideal Gas Law in conjunction with 3 facts and an assumption.

1. Fact: the Patriots balls were measured before the Colts’ balls at halftime. Giving the Colts’ balls more time to acclimate to the warmer atmospheric conditions.

2. Fact: The Patriots balls were measured in their entirety, while less than half of the Colts balls were measured. Rendering the sample differences between the two data sets unreliable.

3. Fact: the Patriots were on offense heading into halftime. Thus, New England’s balls were out of their bag on the sidelines and exposed to the cold, rainy elements while the Colts’ balls were not.

4. Assumption: despite Exponent’s opinion that he misremembered which gauge he used, Walt Anderson’s use of the logo gauge at pregame inspection accounts for much of the difference in the expected measurements at half-time.

After numerous independent studies seemed to indicate the most probable cause of the football deflation was actually from changes in the environment rather than a cheating scheme, it became very clear that the suspension and the court battle that ensued weren’t really about football PSI. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s defense wasn’t that his star QB really was a cheater, his defense was that he had the power to suspend his star QB for any reason he wanted because Goodell, not Brady, is the real king of the NFL. The court ruled that Goodell did have that power based on the collective bargaining agreement. Tom lost. Science be damned.

So why do so many people still think Brady cheated and deflated footballs? Aside from the possibility that most people just probably don’t actually care enough to explore the actual data, admitting that something you are so undeniably sure of could actually be false is a difficult thing for most people to do. Believing that the media that you have given your trust could actually be lying to you or shamelessly pushing an agenda can be difficult to swallow as well.

I share all of this because we are now witnessing a massive pivot happening in the COVID narrative. Suddenly, it’s actually okay to start saying out loud what would have been grounds for digital timeout just a few weeks ago. A few opportunistic lunatics aside, it seems many are starting to come to their senses. And we're seeing the reversal beginning to play out internationally. Denmark isn’t classifying the disease as socially critical anymore. Sweden won’t be forcing jabs on kids aged 5-12 because, wait for it, there’s no benefit. Britain is ending jab passports.

All while Omicron sends case numbers ripping through “vaccinated” and unvaccinated alike. This isn’t an admission by the powers that be that the disease isn’t potentially dangerous for some; it absolutely still can be. The policy changes, instead, are an admission that 22 months of disrupting the entire world in an attempt to stop the inevitable has utterly failed. This week, the Biden administration formally withdrew the vaccination mandate on businesses after the Supreme Court reminded him that, unlike Roger Goodell, he’s not actually a king. Like the Deflategate decision, the ruling came down to what was permissible legally not whether the scientific truth was on the side of the oppressor - in both cases it was not.

Luckily for businesses and employees in America, the people did a little better than Tommy Touchdown did in the courtroom. That doesn’t mean people like me who were fired over Biden’s unlawful decree will get our jobs back. I can’t pull a Jay Leno and go kick Conan out of my seat. But that’s really not the point. Sometimes just reversing a poor policy decision is the only thing you can do. There are other jurisdictions like Germany, Canada, and Australia that seem committed to destroying themselves, but that’s not our problem in America. Here, the people and the courts have spoken.

There’s, of course, always unintended consequences from good intentions. Isolation and mental health immediately come to mind. How many overdoses, deaths by suicide, and vaccine injuries did we endure as a result of these policies? How many children have been developmentally delayed after being denied the ability to decipher facial body language while peers and teachers have remained masked? How many small businesses are never coming back? We may never be able to quantify the actual cost of all of this.

And though I am thankful for the Supreme Court ruling, it isn’t time to assume the war is won. The totalitarians are coming for things like Substack next. The little thought Nazis of this generation have traded swastikas for man-buns and designer glasses that lack an actual prescription. These censorship totalitarians, like those who came before them, don’t want the people to be exposed to ideas they don’t like. Well that’s too bad, isn’t it? Cause those of us who have been critically thinking longer than the last few days aren’t going anywhere. Like Tom Brady immediately winning another Super Bowl after returning from his fraudulent suspension, we rise from the ashes and we will not be stopped. The truth is on our side.