Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  But Pete Carroll called for pass. They saw the Patriots in their goal line defense, but didn’t adjust to the “Malcolm GO!” directive and ran a pick play. Kearse was supposed to run a pick for Ricardo Lockette, but Browner, the guy the Pats had signed away from Seattle at the beginning of the off-season, would have none of it. He jammed Kearse, freeing Butler to step in front of Lockette, into the path of the ball and into immortality.

  It was an instant sportsgasm unlike any I’ve ever witnessed, made better by the dozens of Patriots players streaming onto the field to congratulate the rookie. Brady showing off his 3-inch vertical jump and a high-pitched squeal like a car alarm going off. Butler, his helmet off, tears streaming down his face while a crowd of teammates walk him to the sideline. I’m not ashamed to admit that clip is like video pepper spray to me. And Pete Carroll, putting his hands on his knees and crying out “Oh no!” while his headset falls to the ground, is a nice bit of comedy relief to cut through the treacle.

  The Patriots got a penalty for running onto the field, but since it was a half-the-distance-to-the-goal situation, it moved the ball about a centimeter. So there was the very real threat of a safety, which would make it a two-point game and give the Seahawks the ball back. But Brady very quickly eliminated that threat by drawing the defensive linemen offsides with a hard snap count that gave his team 5 yards of breathing room. One kneel down, a fight started by Seattle end Bruce Irvin, a bunch of penalty flags, an ejection, and a final whistle later, and the Patriots had ring number four.

  To Richard Sherman’s credit, while the fight was going on (and Rob Gronkowski was rag-dolling Irvin all over the back of the end zone), he walked over to a still kneeling Tom Brady and held his hand out. It was actually sort of awkward for a minute, as Brady wasn’t looking up and didn’t see Sherman there, so it looked like he was leaving him hanging. But then they shook hands and the celebrating began.

  As post–Super Bowl celebrations go, it was great—the right blend of knowing you’d just witnessed a classic between two deserving teams, a heart-stopping finish, an unlikely hero, legacies cemented, a controversial coaching decision (the right kind of controversy to have), plus the added bonus of a socially awkward trophy presentation as Roger Goodell looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there.

  I went to cover the parade live for the radio station. There had been a massive snowstorm in the area that buried the region, and there were signs everywhere telling people not to stand on the snowbanks. Which were ignored by everyone. Not because anyone was out of control, just that the atmosphere was one of pride, happiness, and defiance, mixed with drunkenness.

  This was the first Patriots duck boat parade in 10 years, meaning it was the first involving Barstool Sports and the first involving Gronk. “Viva la Stool” signs were everywhere. Gronk was being handed beers and shotgunning them. And the sight of all four Lombardi trophies was hard for your brain to process, though beer and Fireball whiskey helped a lot of people.

  What we found out later, because the team released the video footage, was that they had practiced against that very play Seattle ran on the goal line. It had come up in film study. In the video, Butler sat back and tried to play the route, got caught up by the pick, and gave up the touchdown. So the coaches explained to him that he’s got to go forward, drive on the ball, and cut off the route, which is exactly how he did it in the game.

  And while it’s a smaller point, I remembered seeing a clip of Belichick in practice in 2009, talking to the late Marquise Hill, a defensive tackle, about what to expect when an offense has the ball on their own goal line. How they will try to draw him offsides, because if he jumps, it’s a 5-yard penalty. If they jump, it’s only half the distance to the goal. “Only about six inches,” he says. Which is exactly what the Patriots did to the Seahawks to eliminate their one, desperate hope of winning at the end of the Super Bowl.

  In the days and months to follow, that’s what I kept focusing on. That preparation. That attention to detail. That situational awareness. Those were the things that defined this team. That was the reason for their success. The fact that one obscure play from the 100th practice of their season ended up directly winning them a championship.

  It wasn’t about air pressure or spy cameras or Tuck Rules. It was just being more ready to win than anybody else. From halftime of the AFC championship game to the end of the Super Bowl, without the benefit of allegedly doctored footballs, they’d played two of the best teams in the league for six quarters and outscored them 56–24. On the two final drives against the best defense in the league, Brady completed 13 of his 15 pass attempts and threw for two touchdowns. He threw for four in the game, to four different receivers, against the same unit that held Peyton Manning to eight points just the year before.

  I’d hoped that the Super Bowl win would put the Deflategate investigation into an early grave, but I was being naïve. It didn’t. It just magnified everything. There was just one more reason now to come hard after New England, more incentive for opposing owners, GMs, coaches, and players to want to see them taken down and discredited.

  And that gave more motivation to the commissioner, who had looked like such a feckless buffoon on past disciplinary matters like Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, to come down hard on his Super Bowl champions, to placate the other owners and make himself look strong and powerful.

  The witch hunt had already started, and there are two things I know to be true: Witches don’t exist. But witch hunts always manage to find them.

  32

  Defend the Wall

  I don’t know who started using it first, but it was so obvious and so organic it probably came from everyone all at once. It was the perfect pop culture analogy and it just took off: Defending the Wall.

  I was using it. The guys at Barstool used it. Variations of T-shirts that didn’t commit copyright infringements on Game of Thrones while using similar fonts started appearing everywhere. The Night’s Watch. Kings of the North. The North Remembers. These fast became the “We’re on to Cincinnati” of the Deflategate fight.

  Pats fans continued to fight it harder than ever. Super Bowl XLIX emboldened them even more than the anti-Patriots trolls. One of the first targets was no one less than the NFL Network’s choice for the best player in NFL history, Jerry Rice. He said the Patriots should get an asterisk for winning a Super Bowl after getting caught cheating. Within minutes, someone dug up an appearance he’d done about two weeks earlier on an ESPN show about the history of receivers’ gloves. “I know this might be a little illegal guys,” he said. “I just put a little spray, a little Stickum on ’em, to make sure that texture is a little sticky.” He admitted doing it during his playing days, when it was no longer legal.

  The message from New England was clear. This fan base was galvanized, motivated, and knew their way around the Internet. If anyone was going to be a Deflategate Truther, they’d better be pure themselves or they were going to be outed, fast. Which made 2015 a very busy year.

  Actually, the Patriots would be directly involved in the next NFL scandal of the year, except this time they were the victims of a rules violation, so nobody outside of their fan base cared.

  Back in December, Jets owner Woody Johnson gave a press conference as his team announced the firing of head coach Rex Ryan. When asked about Darrelle Revis, he said, “I’d love to have Darrelle back.” Which was a slight problem when you consider that Revis had a job. His job at that time involved getting ready for the playoffs, and he was under contract to the Patriots for another season. In no way, shape, or form is that not tampering, even if, as a great many people did, you want to excuse it away by saying Woody was a dope who had simply hit the Sperm Lottery by inheriting the Johnson & Johnson fortune and therefore shouldn’t be held accountable to his own words.

  But teams had been found guilty of tampering for far less. There have been draft picks forfeited. Sometimes picks were swapped with the team that was done dirty, even if the player didn’t even sign with the tamp
ering team and was only a marginal participant. Here we had an open-and-shut case of the owner of the team Revis used to play for, with their season over, talking about how he’d like to have him back. And he just happened to be the best player the franchise had maybe ever had.

  When the free agency period began, the Patriots released Revis. They had approached him about an extension, but he didn’t budge off the prohibitive salary already on his deal, so the team had to move on. Within hours of his release, a Revis family member tweeted a picture of him sitting next to a Jets helmet and signing with them.

  I actually did the math. The Pats made Revis a free agent at 4:00 p.m. The picture was taken in Florida. The sun was out. Sunset in that part of Florida that time of year was approximately 7:30. Meaning that, if you want to believe this was all done according to the rules, the Jets contacted Revis, made him an offer, worked out all the details, drew up the contract, and got him to sign, all in less than three and a half hours. Darrelle Revis, the savviest negotiator of any athlete in history, making a deal in that amount of time? It was an insult to the intelligence of the world to expect anyone would believe that a deal hadn’t been ready to go for weeks.

  To the NFL’s credit, they did not believe it. Roger Goodell found the Jets guilty of tampering. To teach them a lesson, he fined them $100,000. The Patriots lost their best defensive player, who had helped them win a Super Bowl, and it was treated like a misdemeanor. Woody Johnson lost the amount of money he made selling baby powder in the time it took you to read this sentence. But no draft picks and nothing going to New England.

  It drove me nuts to the point where I was spending time researching sunsets in Florida just to make a point. This is what you did to me, Goodell. You created this monster.

  But it was really the Summer of Deflategate. The story just never went away. The country believed Tom Brady and the Patriots were guilty of messing with the footballs and found a way to make every leak in the investigation seem plausible. It was a prime example of confirmation bias. They believed because they wanted to believe.

  ESPN kept the story alive more than anyone, along with all the other suspicions of wrongdoing in New England. Hannah Storm referenced the tape of the Rams’ Super Bowl XXXVI walkthrough as if it actually existed, without a correction. A prime-time SportsCenter ran a graphic of all the times the Patriots were alleged to have cheated that included the fairy-tale walkthrough tape. After being bombarded on social media by Patriots fans, they issued a correction. In the middle of the night when no one was watching. As the lawyers say, you can’t unring that bell.

  The moment of highest comedy, though, was on an Outside the Lines investigation into Deflategate in which correspondent Kelly Naqi came on live to breathlessly report a bombshell development in the case. Picture a 1930s movie where a guy reporter with a pin on his hat that says “Press” comes bursting into his editor’s office and says in a mid-Atlantic accent, “Stop the presses, chief! I’ve got a scoop that’ll set this town on its ear!” and you’ll get Naqi’s general tone.

  She reported that the Patriots had tried to get kicking balls into the AFC championship game that had not been inspected by the officials. It was a shocking revelation—for the 30 seconds or so before their top NFL reporter Adam Schefter came on and said the unapproved balls were submitted by the league employee in charge of them. He had been taking the real game balls that were meant to be auctioned off to benefit NFL Charities and stealing them to sell on eBay for his own profit.

  It was hilarious. You could not make it up. The NFL was in hysterics about the integrity of the footballs while their own people were stealing them away from needy kids. And the best part was that Kelly Naqi was never heard from again. She just fell off the grid like Jason Bourne. The only update any of us ever heard on her was from NBC Sports’ Tom E. Curran, who connected some dots. Her husband, Hussain Naqi, worked as VP of Business Planning for MetLife Stadium, the site of Super Bowl XLVIII the year before. Meaning he worked hand in hand with the NFL’s VP of Game Operations, Mike Kensil, the obvious source of Kelly’s big scoop.

  That was actually much funnier than President Obama at their White House visit saying, “I usually tell a bunch of jokes at these things, but I’m afraid with the Patriots in town, 11 out of 12 of them would fall flat” while everyone groaned and Bill Belichick gave “two thumbs down” to a man who could order a drone strike against anyone and had Bin Laden killed. “That whole story got blown out of proportion,” the President added. Rimshot. Goodnight folks, drive safe.

  Mostly we waited for the Wells Report to come out, enduring all the rumors and speculation and fake news reports. Finally it hit on May 6, just as we were about to start our radio show. Literally we were reading through pages live on the air as they came out of the printer, trying to absorb the information and make sense of it. What jumped out to everyone first was the part where the entire 243-page epic saga boiled down to one sentence that became part of the language. It said that it was more probable than not that Tom Brady was at least generally aware of a scheme to deflate the footballs prior to the game in January.

  That’s it. Which is to say, my immediate reaction was, “That’s IT?!?” That’s what over five months and north of $5 million came up with? “More probable than not” and “at least generally aware” was all they could come up with? I was DeNiro as Capone yelling at Eliot Ness, “You got nothing! Nuh-THING!!!” If that’s the best they could do, then I felt like Brady was home free. Vindicated.

  The report stated categorically that neither Bill Belichick nor any of the Kraft family nor any of their staff had anything to do with any kind of a scheme. The main characters were Jim McNally, a game day worker and the guy who carried the bag of balls into the bathroom with him, and John Jastremski, Brady’s assistant and a full-time employee. They were the R2D2 and C3PO of this sprawling saga, the comedy relief side characters who were somehow central to all the action.

  Most of the juicy stuff that made it into the first couple of dozen pages were months’ worth of texts between the two. About the time when the Patriots played the Jets and Brady was furious because the footballs were way overinflated, Jastremski checked the pressure and they were over 16.0 psi, ridiculously above the legal limit. It was like trying to throw a blimp. There were some “Tom sucks . . . I’m going make that next ball a fuckin’ balloon” anger. A “Fuck tom . . . 16 is nothing . . . wait ’til Sunday” followed by “Omg! Spaz.” There was stuff in there about Brady signing merchandise for them. And if you wanted to, you could connect the dots that there was a business arrangement going on here. McNally and Jastremski would help Brady cheat, and he would buy them off with free autographs.

  That is, if you wanted to. Which most everybody did. Again, confirmation bias. But nowhere in there, through page after page drawn up over thousands of billable hours, was there anything where either guy said Brady would give them stuff in exchange for them helping him break the rules.

  Oh, there was some gold to be mined in there. The fact that one of them called the other Dorito Dink, and a lot of the dumbassery that only exists between buddies who think this will stay just between them. The stuff that made most guys go back and start deleting old text threads and thank their maker their words will never be made public the way McNally and Jastremski’s were.

  But there was one text that stood out. It was the closest Ted Wells had to a smoking gun, and he made sure he led with it. It was the headline everyone seized on immediately: the text in which McNally referred to himself as “The Deflator.” Specifically, “nice dude . . . jimmy needs some kicks . . . let’s make a deal . . . come on help the deflator.”

  That’s pretty damning, if you’re predisposed to believe the conspiracy theory being laid out in this. But it loses all its white-hot intensity when you realize it was sent in May, the part of the calendar the furthest away from having anything to do with the NFL schedule. And to try to tie it into the “Football Used During the AFC championship game on January 18, 2015,” which
I put in quotes because it is from the actual title of the fucking Wells Report, isn’t connecting the dots. It’s trying to lob a lawn dart at a target over the horizon.

  Yet everyone did, helped in large part by the firm who did the “scientific” research for the Wells Report, Exponent. A simple Google search revealed how bad Exponent’s reputation is in the scientific community. How they’d been accused of interpreting data in any way that helps a paying client prove whatever conclusions they want proven. How at various times they’ve been hired to prove that secondhand cigarette smoke doesn’t cause cancer, that asbestos in brake pads doesn’t hurt auto workers, and that dumping toxic waste is safe for rain forests. And while the ink was still wet on the Wells Report pages, it became obvious why Exponent was needed. This was a job that called for some junk science.

  One of the first things I couldn’t help notice was the way Roger Goodell’s “fair” and “independent” investigation described AFC championship game referee Walt Anderson. “Anderson is one of the most well-respected referees in the NFL,” it reads. “It is obvious he approaches his responsibilities with a high level of professionalism and integrity.” It went on to explain that he is “exceedingly meticulous, diligent, and careful.” While it might all be true and I have no reason to doubt Walt Anderson’s character, where are the facts in there? How is that the language of an unbiased investigator? Those aren’t facts; they’re characterizations. No cop worth his badge would put opinions like that on a police report. He’d be told to write it over again or he’d find himself working the parking meter beat.

  But all of Anderson’s “professionalism and integrity” got kicked right into the storm drain when they got in the way of Wells’s conclusion that the footballs were underinflated. His “exceedingly meticulous, diligent, and careful” methods somehow involved using two vastly different pressure gauges to meticulously, diligently, and carefully measure the psi of the balls, gauges that were almost 0.5 psi different from one another.